Section 232 – Steel and Aluminum

… or as they’ve been dubbed, “Trump’s tariffs”.

Let’s see what happened: as of August 29, 2025, the U.S. government eliminated the de minimis threshold for all countries, making the rule apply regardless of country of origin. That means every shipment entering USA borders — regardless of value or origin — will now go through formal or informal customs entry and be assessed import duties, taxes, and fees.

The important part about these new regulations is that this “Section 232” applies specifically to any “goods substantially made from Steel and Aluminum” that wasn’t smelted or sourced in the USA and, since our parts are made from aluminum, unless where specified, and are Made in Italy, they fit the case.

This section underwent a few modifications since 2025, causing a lot of uncertainty both for final customers and Customs Officers that were caught in a chaotic situation, resulting in some very wrong calculations, long phone calls, back & forth emails between us, customers and Customs. Until now we always succeeded completing the process correctly but has been quite testing. According to latest changes, which went into effect April 6 2026, aforementioned goods will incur a 25% levy on total parts’ value (shipping amount should not be considered when calculating, see attached example image below).

In order to make shipping and parcels’ Customs clearance process as smooth as possible, we always have to upload proper documentation on DHL website when creating shipping labels (meaning packing list, or pro-forma invoice, or actual invoice and declaration of origin for parts we ship).

Nonetheless, since the Officers at Customs sometimes are still not appliying tariffs correctly, if you’re asked to pay fees for an unusually high figure, don’t bounce the parcel, just get in contact with your local customer service and insist on them checking the correct procedure and they’ll figure out the right amount. This will ensure a faster delivery and a lot less stress for everyone involved, you, us and Customs Officers.

Beware: AEM Factory is not liable for any of these duties, taxes, fees amounts requested by USA Customs / courier for parcels’ delivery; none of those aforementioned amounts are included in prices shown on our website or quotations/invoices.
We won’t declare false amounts on documents nor declare different HTS Code from actual 8714.10.0050, it’s illegal and consequences would be terrible on us if we did so, please, don’t ask us to do that.

If you won’t pay what your government requires for your parcel to be cleared, after 3-5 days DHL  will return it to us automatically: in this case read carefully our returns’ policy (click here for our F.A.Q page), it applies to these cases as well, so you’ll only get a refund for parts’ paid price deducted of any amount we’re asked to get the parcel returned (original shipment amount, Italian Customs fees / Italian VAT / couriers’ returning fees / other, we’ll provide proper documents proving what we’ll have to pay, it could be a hefty amount).

Unfortunately this situation doesn’t depend on us and actually hurts our business too, best we can do is stating very clearly what can and can’t be done.

Thanks for understanding our position and for your cooperation!

Resources:

Click here for U.S. Department of Commerce website: this page shows all updates on Section 232.

Click here for HTS Codes’ table: this page shows the updated levy rate for our parts code.