U.S. consumers will delay or forgo technology upgrades if President Donald Trump imposes a new round of 25 percent tariffs on Chinese goods, slowing the U.S. innovation engine, technology industry executives said on Monday.

Consumer technology products, including cellphones, laptop and tablet computers, smart speakers and video gaming consoles, would make up 167 billion U.S. dollars of that 300 billion U.S. dollars total, or more than half the target list, said Sage Chandler, vice president of international trade for the Consumer Technology Association. 

Chandler told a hearing on the tariffs hosted by the U.S. Trade Representative's office that imposing the tariffs would raise the retail price of cellphones by an average of 70 U.S. dollars, while the price of laptop computers would rise by 120 U.S. dollars and video game consoles by 56 U.S dollars.

"A lot of consumers will look at that and say: 'I'll just wait for the next generation.' That's a lot of money for the average consumer," Chandler told Reuters. 

Chandler, whose association represents major tech groups including Apple Inc, Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc's Google and Intel Corp, told the hearing the proposed tariffs would extend a ripple effect that would spread through the U.S. economy. 

"Because technology is now the backbone of so many other industries - from agriculture to manufacturing - taxes on technology hit far beyond the technology industry," Chandler said. 

Win Cramer, founder and chief executive of JLab Audio, a California-based maker of Bluetooth wireless headphones, said he added eight employees after the company's products were spared from the previous round of tariffs. But Cramer said he may have to lay off some of those people, as a 25 percent tariff would shrink sales. 

"The proposed tariffs on products that make up 80 percent of our business would be catastrophic. We would be forced to lay off employees and raise prices to consumers," he said. "The factory jobs that build our products never existed in America."

Other company executives from industries ranging from food equipment to fashion products repeated a refrain from five days of hearings last week - that they relied heavily on China for production and it would be extremely difficult and costly to shift their supply chains to other countries, taking two to three years to do so. 

Christine Robins, chief executive of Georgia-based gas barbecue grill maker Char-Broil LLC, said the tariffs would force the company to raise prices, increasing the risk that large retailers would try to cut costs by contracting directly with Chinese factories for private-label grills and "squeeze out" established U.S. brands such as Char-Broil.