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Over a frantic 72 hours, President Donald Trump’s threat of punishing new tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China sent stocks and currencies tumbling and shock waves through world trade.
It also sent manufacturing businesses scrambling for cover.
A North Carolina-based maker of concrete equipment rushed to get its machines onto trucks bound for Canada. The CEO of the world’s biggest producer of embroidered patches had to swap a Saturday night family dinner for a conference call with executives. A trade lawyer in Ohio was emailing his manufacturing clients after midnight on Sunday.
While Trump campaigned hard on the promise of new tariffs, the pace of developments in recent days has rattled producers and forced them to game out ways to protect their operations. Even after the president put a one-month hold on the Mexico and Canada duties on Monday, executives are still very much on watch for additional tariffs.
One of those caught in the middle is Stephen Bullock, president of Salisbury, North Carolina-based Power Curbers that makes concrete-paving equipment used for roads and highway safety barriers. The company generates about a quarter of its revenues from outside the US — including Canada.
As news of the tariffs came through, Bullock was fielding calls from his dealers up north, where any retaliatory tariffs would have hammered local sales.
“Our phone was ringing at 8 a.m. this morning from our dealer in Ontario and they asked me to ship them as quickly as we could to try and beat the tariffs,” Bullock said Monday before the delay was announced. That triggered a rush to source trucks in an attempt to get the $350,000-a-piece machines to Canada in time.
Even with the 30-day hold, time is of the essence. “It’s a race to the border,” he said.
It was similarly frantic for Randy Carr, who runs World Emblem, the biggest global manufacturer of emblems and patches for clients including Levi Strauss & Co. Saturday night dinner with family was replaced by calls with senior executives and a flurry of text messages with customers.
“We have had to suspend every capex project we have for the next 24 months until we better understand the trade situation,” Carr said.
World Emblem also paused hiring plans, said the executive, whose company has 1,300 employees between production bases in the US and Mexico. “It’s reminiscent of the adjustments we had to make during Covid-19.”
The trade shock overshadowed what could have been a potential turning point for the manufacturing sector: data out Monday showed factory activity expanded last month for the first time since 2022 as orders ramped up and production quickened. The Institute for Supply Management’s surveys were conducted before the tariff announcements in the past few days.
Tariffs will probably reverse the nascent trend, if history is any guide: during Trump’s first term, factory employment shrank and industrial production declined after the duties were enacted.
Broader trade uncertainty was also a drag on growth back then and will likely weigh on investment again, with the administration pressing ahead with a planned 10% duty on Chinese goods and keeping alive the prospect for trade tensions with the European Union.
Chip McElroy’s namesake company, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, creates thermoplastic fusion equipment that include semiconductor fabs, data centers and power plants. The business relies on imported materials from Canada and Mexico, and the tariffs as proposed would have cost an estimated $2 million over the next 12 months — charges he would need to pass along to customers.
“This latest salvo of tariffs is hugely problematic,” McElroy said. Sourcing his entire supply chain in the US isn’t simple. “Even if we could wave a magic wand tomorrow, there are things that we need from our trading partners to the north and to the south and even from the east.”
His biggest fear: a cycle of retaliation and tit-for-tat tariffs between the US, Canada and Mexico. “It is going to be very, very bad for our business and very bad for the US economy and ultimately very bad for our workforce,” he cautioned.
Even the process behind the tariffs has been a source of uncertainty as Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1970s-era law that grants the president broad tariff authority in national emergencies. Lawyers say the language lacked the precision of past decisions on trade, leaving companies clamoring for specific details on how they would be impacted.
“Activity has been through the roof,” said Richard Mojica, a Washington, DC-based trade attorney at Miller & Chevalier. “Companies are reaching out to understand how the big picture affects them but also to discuss the nuances related to their specific products. This is not one-size-fits-all.”
Dan Ujczo, a Columbus, Ohio-based trade lawyer at Thompson Hine LLP, is advising executives to remain vigilant. He has been working through the night as his clients, typically big multinational firms and smaller manufacturers, seek guidance on how to prepare.
“It was nonstop activity, nonstop phones calls, nonstop briefings,” over the weekend, he said, adding he sent a state of play update to clients just after midnight on Sunday. While some have taken steps to insulate their supply chains based on experience from Trump’s first-term tariffs and the pandemic disruptions, Ujczo’s advice is to brace for impact.
“Those who don’t feel they have been impacted yet, they will be,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”
—With assistance from Cailley LaPara and Sam Hall.