Trade & Sourcing
Beyond the China Question: Mexico Supplied 49.71% of Tracked Wire Imports in 2025
In complete 2025 country boards, Mexico supplied 49.71% of tracked wire/cable customs value; China supplied 55.11% of industrial lighting and 45.18% of batteries. Recomputed wire/cable country HHI was 2,682.45. A different leading country does not by itself establish diversified sourcing.
Editorial evidence cutoff: September 9, 2026. Published September 29, 2026. Observation periods are stated throughout; older figures are retrospective evidence.
Removing China from a sourcing headline does not automatically produce a diversified supply base. In the complete 2025 country record for tracked wire and cable, Mexico supplied 49.71% of US customs import value. The leading country changed the geography of concentration, not the need to measure it.
That historical pattern matters for September 2026 sourcing reviews because dependence can be renamed more easily than it can be reduced. A dashboard built around exposure to one country may miss heavy reliance on another. A dashboard that counts countries can also miss how little business most of those countries represent.
This investigation examines four manufacturing families using the full country boards available by September 9. It measures the distribution of recorded customs value, then asks what that measure can and cannot establish about resilience.
HALF THE WIRE VALUE CAME FROM ONE COUNTRY
Mexico accounted for 49.71% of tracked wire-and-cable imports by customs value in 2025. The board contains 130 reporting origins. Both facts are true: the list is long, but one origin accounts for almost half the value.
That distinction limits the usefulness of a raw country count. A family can have many minor sources without a broad distribution among commercially substantial ones. Adding another very small origin would increase the count while barely changing the dependence visible in value shares.
The USITC DataWeb records do not identify qualified substitute capacity, supplier ownership or the ability to ramp production. The presence of an origin in the annual board establishes recorded trade, not a ready alternative for every cable specification a manufacturer buys.
CONCENTRATION APPEARS UNDER DIFFERENT COUNTRY NAMES
China supplied 55.11% of industrial-lighting customs value and 45.18% of batteries in 2025. Mexico supplied 35.92% of engines. The four leaders and shares differ, but every example illustrates a substantial leading-country position.
The families also have different numbers of reporting origins: 80 for industrial lighting, 100 for batteries and 131 for engines. The engine board has one more origin than wire and cable, yet the leading share is meaningfully smaller. The count alone does not reveal that difference.
These comparisons do not label any country unsafe. They show the distribution of a measured exposure. Operational consequences depend on the specific products, plants and disruptions a company faces. The public record cannot turn a geographic share into a probability of interruption or a predicted number of lost production days.
A SCORE THAT USES THE WHOLE DISTRIBUTION
The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index adds the squared country shares, with shares expressed as percentages. This gives greater weight to larger origins. Using every country in the saved boards produces an index of 2,682.45 for wire and cable, 3,202.43 for industrial lighting, 2,503.07 for batteries and 1,787.31 for engines.
The Justice Department's description of the index supplies the mathematical definition. Its use here is descriptive. Competition-policy thresholds should not be imported into a sourcing analysis as if they were validated supply-chain risk categories.
The index improves on the country count because a tiny supplier-country share contributes very little while a dominant one contributes much more. It still compresses a distribution into one number. Different arrangements can generate similar scores, so the leading origins and underlying shares remain necessary context.
THE COMPANY'S SUPPLIERS MAY BE LESS INDEPENDENT THAN ITS COUNTRIES
Country diversification and supplier independence are different questions. Two factories in different countries could share an owner, an upstream component or a critical logistics route. Several suppliers in one country could be commercially independent but exposed to the same geographic event. The aggregate customs board identifies neither structure.
Likewise, annual value shares do not measure substitutability. Two origins can supply different product types within the same broad family. A buyer of a specialized cable may not be able to redirect an order to the country supplying a different gauge, certification or end use.
Those limits make the public data a starting point for investigation. They do not justify dismissing it. A large country share can identify where questions about alternate capacity and common dependencies deserve attention. Answering those questions requires supplier and product evidence beyond the import table.
THE DENOMINATOR CAN CREATE A FALSE SENSE OF PRECISION
This comparison uses each family's complete country board and the corresponding total customs value. It does not renormalize only the largest countries. A top-ten display may be useful visually, but treating its subtotal as the whole would overstate the displayed countries' shares and alter the concentration score.
The source values reconcile to the annual family totals. The calculation therefore describes the entire tracked country distribution for those families, including the small origins. That is especially important for an index intended to summarize all shares rather than only the largest one.
Customs value is still nominal dollars. An origin's share can change when product values or composition change, even without a proportional change in physical quantities. The Census trade definitions provide the valuation context. No claim about shares of units, tonnage or supplier capacity is made here.
A BETTER SEPTEMBER QUESTION THAN SIMPLY ASKING ABOUT CHINA
For a September 2026 review, the completed 2025 observations suggest a more complete sequence of questions. Which origins dominate the company's actual specifications? How much qualified alternative capacity exists? Which apparent alternatives share a common upstream dependency? The public data can identify concentration, while company evidence determines its operational significance.
This is a retrospective lesson, not a claim that the 2025 shares remained unchanged through September. New purchases and new facilities can alter the distribution. The historical pattern is useful because it tests whether the measurement framework would notice concentration under any country name.
Wire and cable provides the clear example: 130 origins coexist with a 49.71% leading-country share. Reducing a particular geopolitical exposure may be a deliberate goal, but it is distinct from broadening the source distribution. Keeping those objectives separate makes progress measurable and prevents a change in the label on a supplier map from being mistaken for a verified change in resilience.
Sources and evidence
Evidence period: 2025 complete country boards only. The frozen evidence record lists the source files and verified hashes available September 9, 2026. Source revision: 5e4fb7726c3d40060c0151c086c903baae856cab. Later live-data updates do not alter the historical evidence in this article.
census.gov/foreign-trade/guide/sec2.html
Published 2026-09-29.