Cisco chief exec Chuck Robbins has warned that a US-China trade war over tariffs could lead to price rises for Switchzilla’s networking kit.

"The tariffs that are suggested are across a lot of our core networking products, so it's fairly significant," Chuck Robbins told American telly station CNBC during an interview.

Most of the world’s silicon needs, as well as electronics module production, are done in China. With the US trade tariffs including everything from PCBs through fibre-optic cables to bare-bones transistors, any US tech biz with manufacturing operations in China is going to be similarly hit.

"If you look at what's happened with memory prices in technology, everybody passes those through and I think this is the way most companies are going to have to deal with it,” continued Robbins to CNBC.

Familiar US enterprise networking names including Cisco, Dell, HPE and others last week penned a letter asking the US government not to impose tariffs.

For its part, China has issued retaliatory tariffs against US imports, with the potential value of the goods affected running into hundreds of billions of US dollars.

The impact on the UK market will probably mirror whatever happens to American prices, as ultimately most of the goods are made in China and dispatched to sales destinations. And lest we forget, UK channel customers of Cisco pay for the kit in US dollars.

Cisco has not returned a call for comment. ®