By Elisabeth Buchwald, CNN

(CNN) — US President Donald Trump announced a new trade deal with South Korea, which calls for 15% tariffs on goods from there, after the country scrambled to secure an agreement ahead of the Friday deadline.

“The Deal is that South Korea will give to the United States $350 Billion Dollars for Investments owned and controlled by the United States, and selected by myself,” he said in a Truth Social post on Wednesday.

Goods from South Korea briefly faced a 25% “reciprocal” tariff in April, before Trump paused levies impacting dozens of nations. The pause was set to expire on August 1.

Announcing the deal on Facebook, South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung said an agreement was reached despite a tight timeframe and tough conditions. Lee only took office in June after his predecessor was removed for declaring martial law.

“We just overcame a big challenge,” he said. “Today’s deal eliminated uncertainty in the export environment.”

Among the $350 billion fund, $150 billion will be dedicated to shipbuilding cooperation, supporting Korean companies’ entry into the US shipbuilding industry, Lee said. The rest will go to semiconductors, secondary batteries, biologics and energy.

The new tariff of 15%, however, is still higher than the 10% minimum tariff South Korea’s and dozens of other nations’ goods have faced since April.

Even at current levels, Trump’s tariffs have been taking a toll on South Korea’s economy, with gross domestic product for the first quarter of this year unexpectedly contracting by an annual rate of 0.1%, the first negative reading in four years. A 25% tariff would have made the economic pain even more acute.

It’s a dilemma facing each of America’s trading partners: Give in to Trump’s demands to get off his August 1 “worst offenders” tariff list; or stand your ground and face potentially crippling import duties.

The general understanding for months has been that tariffs won’t go back to where they were before Trump’s second term. But now heads of state are grappling with the fact that they probably won’t stay at current levels either come Friday.

For example, Trump increased tariffs on Brazilian goods by 40 percentage points to 50% on Wednesday after its president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, refused Trump’s demands to end its trial against right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Goods from the European Union and Japan, with which Trump announced recent trade agreements, also will face 15% tariffs on Friday. Those agreements included relief from sectoral tariffs in place or threatened, including on autos and pharmaceuticals.

Like Japan, cars from South Korea shipped to the US will face lower tariffs of 15%, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a Wednesday post on X. “They will also not be treated any worse than any other country on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. Steel, aluminum, and copper are not included and remain unchanged,” he added.

Lutnick said South Korea would also purchase $100 billion of liquified natural gas and other energy products from the US over the next 3.5 years.

South Korea’s finance minister Koo Yun-cheol, part of the country’s trade negotiation team in Washington, highlighted the $150 billion shipbuilding fund as a key component of the deal, saying that it will include building new shipyards in the US, training workers and renewing the supply chain, among other things.

Koo said the fund was set up in response to Trump’s interest in resurrecting the American shipbuilding industry, and contributed “hugely” to reaching the deal with the US.

At a press briefing on Thursday, Kim Yong-beom, head of the South Korean president’s policy office, confirmed Lee would meet Trump within the next two weeks.

Kim added that the US had “strongly demanded” that South Korea open its agricultural market during negotiations, but officials pushed back.

“Considering the food security and the sensitivity of our agriculture industry, we agreed not to additionally open the domestic rice and beef markets,” he said.

South Korea is the United States’ seventh-greatest source of imports. Last year it shipped $132 billion worth of goods to the US, according to Commerce Department data. In addition to cars and car parts, semiconductors and electronics were among the top goods Americans bought from there.

Meanwhile, the US exported $66 billion worth of goods to South Korea last year. Oil and gas, as well as industrial machinery, were the top two exports.

The United States and South Korea have had numerous free trade agreements over the past two decades, which have been renegotiated on several occasions, including during the first Trump administration.

This story has been updated with additional context and developments.

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John Liu in Hong Kong and Gawon Bae in Seoul contributed reporting.