LONDON/SEOUL/NEW YORK--Businesses across multiple industries are hiking prices, backing away from previous financial guidance and warning of growing uncertainty as U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war pushes up costs, upends supply chains and stirs concerns about the global economy.
Earnings releases on Thursday showed that corporations around the world ran into a wall of uncertainty in the first quarter, as executives found themselves navigating the Trump administration's constantly shifting stance on trade. With the earnings season entering its second busy week, companies were counting the costs of the chaos and setting out how they plan to stem the fallout. "We will have to pull every lever we have in our arsenal to mitigate the impact of tariffs within our cost structure and P&L," Procter & Gamble Chief Financial Officer Andre Schulten said on a media call after the Pampers maker announced plans to hike prices to cover the impact of extra costs from the sweeping tariff war. Comments from the biggest packaged food, drinks and consumer goods companies also underscored worries among businesses and investors that Trump's vacillating stance on tariffs and his attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will hurt confidence on Main Street. P&G, soda and snacks giant PepsiCo and medical equipment maker Thermo Fisher Scientific, became the latest companies to cut annual profit forecasts, citing trade turmoil. American Airlines withdrew its 2025 financial guidance, mirroring its peers in the airline industry. "Relative to where we were three months ago, we probably are not feeling as good about the consumer," PepsiCo CFO Jamie Caulfield said on a post-earnings call. Other companies voiced similar sentiments. Nestle CEO Laurent Freixe, Dove soap maker Unilever, and Chipotle Mexican Grill have all flagged weakening U.S. consumer confidence. Almost 30 companies around the globe have either withdrawn or cut their forecasts in the past two weeks, a Reuters analysis shows, including building products company Masco and U.S. airlines Delta and Southwest. Elon Musk's Tesla said it will reassess its growth forecast in three months due in part to trade policy as well as a backlash that has hurt sales of the EV maker. Trump announced hefty tariffs on most other world nations in a pomp-filled event in early April that shook business and consumer confidence and led to a rapid selloff of U.S. assets. Since then, Trump has alternated between retracting some of those levies while threatening additional industry-specific tariffs on trucking, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, among other industries. Administration officials have pointed to ongoing talks with numerous nations as a measure of success of Trump's rhetoric, but numerous companies said the ongoing back-and-forth has left them uncertain how to plan for coming quarters.
