Roku founder/CEO Anthony Wood
Erik Gruenwedel
August 8, 2018
Roku-branded televisions represent one-in-four smart TVs sold in the United States, with CEO Anthony Wood claiming the units are the top-selling TVs on Amazon.
Roku markets branded budget-priced TVs featuring a proprietary OS and assembled by eight manufacturers – Insignia, Element, TCL, Philips, Sharp, RCA, Hitachi and Hisense – four which are Chinese.
With President Trump Aug. 7 launching a second round of tariffs on 279 Chinese-manufactured products, or $16 billion worth of imports, Wood was asked on the fiscal call how tariffs could impact the cost of Roku TVs.
“They don’t appear to affect any of our products,” Wood said. “We have a lot of different TV manufacturers and they are not all in China.”
The Trump Administration is seeking to reduce the $376 billion trade deficit with China through 25% tariffs imposed on myriad products – excluding TVs – and materials manufactured in the People’s Republic of China– the world’s second-largest economy by GDP.
“It’s something that [could] change and so we’re monitoring it carefully,” Wood said.
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