Made Elsewhere

By Dot Kessler. From MFGCalcs Magazine, Issue 1, November 2026, page 28.

Of every $10 of drills, grinders and saws that America imported in 2018, the year duties on its industrial imports began to climb, $6.24 came from China, more than from the rest of the world combined. Last year China’s part was $2.92.

The tools kept coming. America imported about $6.6 billion of them in each of the two years, so China’s smaller part is a smaller slice of the same trade. China was still the biggest single supplier last year. The second biggest was Vietnam, with $2.45 of every $10, enough to pass Mexico, which had been second in 2024.

In August, Techtronic Industries, the company behind Milwaukee and Ryobi power tools, said in its results for the first half of 2026 that its spending included rebalancing its manufacturing network and that it planned to expand capacity in Vietnam and the Americas. The import records do not say whose drills they count, but they lean the same way: from 2024 to last year, China’s share of the trade shrank while Vietnam’s and Mexico’s both grew.

The drills are one of the 32 kinds of industrial goods this story follows, from bearings to pressure vessels, and the usual way to tell what happened to them is as a swap: China out, Mexico in. China’s share of American imports fell in every one between 2018 and 2025. It had been the leading supplier in 11 of them; last year it led in two, the power tools among them. Follow two more of those supply chains, and the trade China lost went somewhere different each time.

In 2018 more than half of America’s imported files, pliers, snips and wrenches, the hand tools without motors, came from China. By last year China’s share had been cut about in half, and more came from Taiwan than from anywhere else. Mexico, the swap story’s winner, supplied less than a twentieth. Taiwan was already America’s biggest supplier of steel fasteners, in both years.

Last year, Chinese hand tools carried estimated duties of about half their value; Taiwanese ones, about a sixth. The records do not say why any buyer switched, and a gap that size is only the reason easiest to count.

The swap story is right about Mexico, as far as it goes. No country took more first places from China, and Mexico led in 10 of the 32 lines last year, more than any other country. A warehousing and storage firm answering the Dallas Fed’s Texas Service Sector Outlook Survey described the pull in April 2025: “It is an odd situation for us because we manufacture in Mexico for multiple companies. The tariff impact is negative, but the uptick in companies requesting our services is significant. Many companies are looking to nearshore out of China and other locations, but none are contemplating a relocation to the U.S.”

Even where Mexico won, the swap was partial. In fabricated structural steel, from frames to towers, China’s share fell by more than two-thirds and Mexico took first place. But Mexico’s own share grew by less than a third of what China lost. The rest went to other suppliers.

A swap would have left each line at least as concentrated as before, with a new name at the top. That is not what the records show. In 28 of the 32 lines, American purchases were less concentrated in a few countries last year than in 2018, insulated wire and cable among them, though Mexico supplied about half of it in both years. The trade did not simply move from one country to another. It spread out.

Economists score that kind of spreading with the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. By our estimate, America’s power-tool imports were more concentrated in 2018 than a trade split evenly among three countries would be. By last year they scored like one split evenly among five.

Answering the Dallas Fed Energy Survey in September 2025, an executive at an oil and gas support services firm saw the spread in the components the firm relied on: “We rely heavily on electrical components and automation to operate our equipment. There has been a noticeable shift in the manufacturing of these products away from China. We are seeing more of these products being assembled in Mexico, India and southeastern Asian countries. Over the course of the past year, tariffs have pushed pricing higher on these products.”

None of these figures counts tools or tons. They are shares of import value, not volume, so a shrinking share can hide steady or rising shipments from China, and a share can grow on price alone. Origin blurs at the edges, too: goods recorded as coming from elsewhere may contain Chinese parts or pass through third countries. And the 2018 records name only each line’s larger suppliers, which can only make that year’s trade look less concentrated than it was.

The new routes picked up duty of their own. In 2024 a dollar of drills from Vietnam or Mexico carried almost no estimated duty. Last year one from Vietnam carried about 9 cents and one from Mexico about 12, against about 22 for one from China. The trade moved; the duty followed.

Live data from this story

• Who’s No. 1 Now: Source shifts: who leads U.S. imports

Read it in the magazine

• MFGCalcs Magazine, Issue 1, November 2026, page 28