Tariff Stacking Drives Structural Shift in Supply Chain Planning
According to FreightWaves, the 2025 tariff environment marked a structural break, not a policy adjustment, forcing companies to redesign supply chain execution from classification to financial sequencing. The Infios report, The Rise of the Tariff-Optimized Supply Chain, analyzed millions of U.S. customs entries and found that duties are now a core planning variable alongside freight cost, lead time, and service level—replacing their previous role as a passive P&L line item.
“Mode selection, entry structuring, even where you warehouse — all those were operational and financial decisions, and tariffs sat quietly in the background as a P&L line item,” said Don Mabry, SVP of Global Trade Solutions at Infios. “That’s no longer the case.”
Shifts in Duty Exposure and Entry Behavior
The report shows that entries with duties in the 35% to 50% bracket grew more than tenfold, while the 50%+ bracket rose from effectively zero to tens of thousands of entries. Prior to 2025, such high-duty exposures were rare; now they are common across multiple product lines. This shift reflects layered tariffs—universal baselines, country-specific adjustments, Section 301, and IEEPA—stacked on the same goods.
As a result, importers began treating duties not as inevitable costs but as design variables. The data reveals that landed cost planning now starts with a 10% to 20% baseline assumption for duties, a dramatic departure from historical practice. Compliance has moved from a back-end checkpoint to a strategic lever shaping routes, modes, and entry structures.
Three Phases of Importer Response
Infios identified two distinct phases in how importers responded. Wave one was reactive, driven by urgency rather than strategy. Mexico’s origin share rose 5.2 percentage points, Canada’s by 1.0 percentage point, and new trade corridors emerged involving Vietnam, Ethiopia, Ireland, and Switzerland. However, these gains proved short-lived: by the second half of 2025, Mexico’s advantage halved to 2.0 percentage points, and Canada’s dropped to 0.4.
When de minimis was removed, Canadian informal entries jumped 79% — from 34,000 to 61,000 overnight, signaling that the policy environment shifted faster than planning cycles could absorb. Air and truck share surged as urgency overrode cost discipline, with air freight gaining approximately 12 percentage points and truck gaining 8, while ocean freight declined by 10% to 12% and did not rebound.
Durable Changes in Supply Chain Structure
Wave two revealed more durable shifts. China’s origin share declined by 2.8 percentage points from May to December 2025 and 2.2 percentage points from July to December, indicating sustained diversification. However, the shift was not uniform: elastic categories like consumer goods and low-complexity electronics diversified away from China, while inelastic categories—specialty chemicals, rare earth products, and certain industrial components—remained China-dependent.
Other key data points include: bonded warehouse usage rose from about 10% to 16%–18% of entries and continued rising; Harmonized Trade System (HTS) classification complexity nearly doubled, increasing from about six sequences per entry to 11.6; and total entered value rose by roughly 78% while entry counts fell by 7%. This indicates a shift toward fewer, higher-value shipments rather than reduced volume.
Don Mabry distinguished between adaptation and optimization: “We’re not claiming companies optimized their tariff position back in 2025. What the data captures is the early stages of active management. True optimization still lies ahead.” The durable changes, he said, were not about sourcing but about smarter classification, deliberate mode selection, phased duty exposure, and more adaptive routing.
Source: FreightWaves
Compiled from international media by the SCI.AI editorial team.
