A new report from Infios is painting a striking picture of how U.S. importers rewired their supply chains in 2025 — not because they wanted to, but because the tariff environment left them no choice. Drawing on millions of customs entries, the report finds that duty rates stacked into the 20%-to-80% range for some product lines, as multiple layers of tariffs hit the same goods simultaneously. That's not a policy adjustment — it's a structural break.
The core shift is behavioural. Importers stopped treating duties as something to accept and started treating them as something to design around. Don Mabry, SVP of Global Trade Solutions at Infios, describes two waves of response. The first was reactive: companies scrambled to test new routes, switch modes, and pull inventory forward before rates climbed higher. Mexico's import share jumped sharply, experimental corridors opened through Vietnam and Ethiopia, and air freight surged as urgency overrode cost discipline. Most of those gains were short-lived.
The second wave produced more durable changes. Ocean freight lost 10-12 percentage points of modal share and didn't recover. Bonded warehouse usage climbed from roughly 10% of entries to 16-18% and kept rising — a sign that companies are now actively deferring duty payments to align costs with actual sales velocity. Meanwhile, the complexity of trade classification nearly doubled, and total entered value rose 78% while entry counts fell 7%, meaning importers were consolidating into fewer, higher-value shipments rather than simply shipping less.
China's decline in origin share held, but the decline in origin share reflects a segmentation of the supply base according to what can and cannot be substituted. Consumer goods and light electronics diversified away; specialty chemicals and rare-earth components stayed China-dependent.
Mabry is clear that this isn't optimisation yet — it's early-stage active management. But the capabilities companies built to survive 2025, smarter classification, deliberate mode selection, adaptive routing, and bonded warehousing as a treasury tool, aren't tied to any single policy outcome. They're built for uncertainty, and that's why they're here to stay.
