All Will Be Hurt if US-China Trade War Escalates in a ‘Big Way,’ Says Jabil CEO

Coping with the U.S.-China trade war “continues to be a moving target,” said Mark Mondello, CEO of contract manufacturer Jabil on a Tuesday earnings call. “You wake up one day, there’s a tweet, you wake up 48 hours later, something else is going on,” said Mondello. “It’s a very complicated issue in terms of what’s going to be, how bad will it get.” There’s some “conversation” in the supply chain that the trade war is “just going to be kind of a little bit of a tit for tat, and then there’s people that have the opinion that it could extrapolate to something much bigger,” he said. If U.S. tensions with China “escalate in a way that we don’t anticipate, but if they were, it absolutely is going to affect our business, as it will everybody’s,” he said. Mondello personally and in dealing with customers tries “not to get too obsessive about how bad things can get,” he said. “We do planning scenarios internally on what we would do, but assuming this thing doesn’t blow up in a big way, I think Jabil’s really well-positioned.”