Originally Posted by eeb
Overseas multinationals with business in the US are eating the tariff. Of course this puts pressure on margins but if they want to sell here you do what you gotta do. My suggestion to firearms dealers in the Uk and Europe would be to adjust their prices to account for tariffs. Eventually buyers here will demand this and it will happen.

Can you share a source for this? What I'm seeing is, at best, weak promises to hold prices for a few months or the remainder of 2025. (Auto example below, at bottom)

For the last 10 years of my career (I retired 2 years ago), I led teams of analysts optimizing pricing. For both a $80Bil retailer and a $15Bil manufacturer. Both companies sold in excess of 40,000 unique items in a given year and varied prices across markets to be competitive and harvest profits. We changed, on average, over 500,000 prices a year, using data science to maximize profits and gain the most margin without customers switching to other sources. Whenever commodity prices increased for a category, or tariffs increased, we raised prices. Some of these waves included price decreases, but the net impact always passed the costs along in total for our company and preserved margin rates. All before those higher costs even showed up in our P&L as cost of goods. We passed it along. If demand significantly tanked for an important item, and it was clearly due to price, we'd take prices down. But then, if it was an important item, we were always watching our competitors and increased as soon as they did.

I can guarantee that US publicly traded companies are passing those tariffs along, simply because their stocks get pummeled if their margin rates slip. The increase may be spread out over a few months or quarters, but it will happen. From a personal perspective -- in each of the companies I worked for, both the pricing team and their business partners who owned the product P&Ls, were bonused on delivering a margin, and that was expressed as a %rate and margin$. And these goals didn't change when commodities or tariffs spiked. You had to figure it out, and passing along the higher costs as higher prices was the default assumption. I can recall multiple directives from the CEO and CFO to pass along cost increases, but not a single instance of 'eating it.'

So a 10% tariff rate increase means a price increase in the short term. Maybe a product or supplier switch in the long run. And Trump's actions may work out in the long run, by increasing our exports and domestic manufacturing base. Big question is the level of economic uncertainty between now and then.

Automotive impacts (a timeline of manufacturer/industry news since this started): https://www.autotrader.com/tariffs?...sv36DTJpLUaAmWKEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Lastly, below is a simple example of a 10% tariff, driving a 10% product cost, and actually increasing $ of margin (profit) per unit sold. Meaning we could make more $profit without selling any extra units.

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