While the potential impacts of tariffs have been discussed in spades across the boardrooms, lunchrooms and mediasphere, there’s one aspect to them that in my opinion has been underreported.

That is, the true size of various market and how sudden, intense changes in prices can distort revenues (and for that matter, profit margins), and thus can throw off efforts to track market data over time.

For instance, consider the hyperinflation brought on by the Covid pandemic. Academic papers studied the swings in prices, wages and subsequent inflation models, but insofar as I can find, they leave the very important work of rebenchmarking industry performance to Wall Street investment analysts and Main Street bankers. 

In an April 2022 post by its chief economist, the Economic Policy Institute found that profits at nonfinancial businesses were “historically high” during Covid. Citizens may have been confined to their houses, but they kept buying. In other words, in periods of uncertainty and stress, reactions do not necessarily follow predictable economic patterns.

Much in the way we must correct for currency swings in order to understand how a particular sector or region performs versus a previous point in time (and our resident contributing editor Dr. Hayao Nakahara does a superb job of this in his annual NTI-100 list of the largest fabricators), we must also reset our bearings if the much-threatened tariffs do come to pass (and stick for any real length of time).

So if the tariffs hold, and the new taxes result in higher prices to businesses, 2025 may end up being the best year on the books for the electronics industry, but with a big asterisk.