plawolf
Lieutenant General
This could actually a much bigger deal than a tariff on foreign chips.
Chips are intermediate goods, never used independently, and the vast majority of PCBs on the planet are made and populated in China, so if China bans the import of a specific chip, you'll have to choose between moving your entire manufacturing operation, or just switching our one chip for another from a Chinese supplier (that's almost certainly also cheaper).
It's also not practically viable to populate PCBs over multiple steps at any amount of quantity, so either you populate the entire PCB in China, or you populate the entire PCB not in China, there's no way to selectively populate just a few chips at a later stage for any meaningful quantity.
The chips on this list like CAN transceivers, digital isolators, gate drivers, etc used in massive quantities in industrial electronics like automotive, EV, drones, aerospace, robotics, industrial control, basically anything bigger than your consumer phone. These chips are all <$10 each but all critical to the device they're used in, which means OEMs has to find an alternative, its extremely easy to find Chinese alternatives, and it's extremely hard for the foreign chipmakers to sustain their production without the option of Chinese assembly.
In other words this move could effectively hard kill entire business divisions for non-Chinese chip makers, and possibly bring down entire companies depend on how much they rely on inndustrial and automotive chip sales. China is the gate keeper between chips and end users, this move is the gate keeper putting up the first filter.
The Chinese ministry of commerce really need to thank Trump and regime for all the insights and invaluable field experience they provided to allow China to refine and test out all of its economic weapons.
Now China can deploy precision strike economic weapons instead of just the crude WMD economic weapons it started with.
