Coty Transitions Manufacturing to US: A Strategic Move to Avoid Tariffs

Coty restructures its production in Barcelona. The American cosmetics company will move the fragrances of the mass market category, which includes Adidas, David Beckham or Vera Wang, as well as the mist to its plant in the North American country, pressured by the tariffs imposed by the government of Donald Trump.

According to El Economista, the company is also studying the transfer of entry-level products from the prestige division in order to optimize its manufacturing capacity in the United States. The Barcelona plant, located in the city of Granollers, is the largest plant in its entire network. Coty markets the Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss and Gucci brands.

To mitigate the tariff impact, the organization has launched a contingency plan with price adjustments and a project to cut costs in order to protect the group’s profitability. Coty estimates the impact of the tariffs at $33 million. The company went into the red in the first half of the current fiscal year.

Company sources explain that the Granollers factory remains a “fundamental pillar” and that total production volumes have increased compared to the previous year.

Coty will transfer the production of the ‘mass market’ line and products such as ‘mist’

Coty sold 2.6% less in the first six months of the current fiscal year, period ending December 31, 2025, to reach a turnover of $3,341.4 million. After entering into losses in the first quarter, in the second quarter of the year the company was in the red at $116.2 million, while in the same period of 2024 the company posted a profit of $30.6 million.

On a half-yearly basis, Coty posted a loss of $42.2 million, while in the same period of 2024 it posted a loss of $121.3 million.

Adjusted gross operating profit (ebitda), meanwhile, fell by 15%, but remained positive at $330.2 million in the second quarter of 2025.

The last few months have also been marked by the exit of Gucci from Coty’s licensing portfolio, following the sale of the beauty catalog of the luxury group Kering to the giant L’Oréal.

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U.S. lawmakers move to reverse Canadian tariffs amid manufacturing concerns

The United States House of Representatives has voted to overturn tariffs on Canadian imports, delivering a rare bipartisan rebuke of the administration’s trade policy and offering a measure of relief to North American manufacturers and cross-border supply chains.

Lawmakers backed a resolution disapproving of the “national emergency” used to justify tariffs that President Donald Trump imposed last year on Canadian goods, which critics say have raised costs for U.S. consumers and businesses. The chamber approved the measure 219–211, with six Republicans joining nearly all Democrats in support.

Although the resolution is largely symbolic, due to the fact it would likely face a presidential veto and require a two-thirds majority to override, the vote highlights growing unease in Congress about the economic effects of unilateral trade actions on manufacturing sectors and allied relationships.

Industry and political pressure

Manufacturers that depend on integrated North American supply chains argued the tariffs have disrupted production and raised input costs, complicating planning and competitiveness. Some lawmakers echoed these concerns, saying Congress should reclaim authority over trade policy and protect jobs and economic stability at home.

Proponents of the rollback emphasized that Canada is a close ally and critical trading partner, particularly in automotive parts, machinery and raw materials — sectors heavily intertwined with U.S. manufacturing. Critics of the tariffs point to data showing that much of the tariff burden falls on U.S. consumers and importers rather than on foreign exporters.

The resolution now moves to the U.S. Senate, where a similar bipartisan vote has already occurred, though passage and enactment remain uncertain. Business leaders and lawmakers say long-term stability will depend on broader cooperation on trade and updated policies that reflect the realities of continental manufacturing integration.

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Tariffs are hurting U.S. manufacturing sector, economist warns

Chief Economist for the Conference Board of Canada Pedro Antunes reacts to the GDP being unchanged in November 2025.

Tariffs are a lose-lose situation for Canada’s and the United States’ manufacturing sector, says a chief economist.

His comments come after Statistics Canada released its November GDP data on Friday pointing to a soft fourth quarter, with the manufacturing sector dragging on the economy after posting a 1.3 per cent decline.

A global shortage of microchips stalled production at a major Canadian auto plant, by 6.4 per cent, creating a “bottleneck” for vehicle and parts output, the agency said.

While Canada’s manufacturing sector is already under pressure from ongoing trade tensions, the fallout is not confined to Canada alone.

“These tariffs are not going to allow for the U.S. to be any more competitive,” Pedro Antunes, chief economist at Signal49 Research, told BNN Bloomberg.

“In fact, they’re hurting our competitiveness North America wide when we think about our positioning on the global stage.”

Antunes said when the U.S. applies tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum, or auto-related products, the impact extends beyond a single product or sector.

Those materials often cross the border multiple times and frequently return to Canada because of the intricate, intertwined supply chains the two countries have built over decades, he said.

“The problems extend just beyond those segments that are specifically hit by tariffs,” said Antunes.

Antunes added that uncertainty around the tariff dispute is already weighing on hiring, investment, and consumer confidence within Canada’s manufacturing sector.

“All of these things are just suggesting a very lethargic economy, no matter which industries you’re really focused on,” he said.

Trade deal an ‘absolute necessity’ for auto sector

Looking ahead, Antunes said the outlook for the manufacturing sector remains weak, with Statistics Canada signalling just a 0.1 per cent increase in GDP for December.

“What that tells us is, essentially, the economy is flat,” said Antunes.

He warned the auto sector will remain under pressure without a resolution to trade tensions with the U.S., noting that about 85 per cent of Canadian manufacturing is destined for the American market.

More than 1,000 workers were laid off at General Motors’ Oshawa plant. The union representing the workers stated that these layoffs resulted from the company shifting jobs to the U.S.

“If we don’t have free access, and if we have tariffs at 25 per cent on Canadian content, that is not going to alleviate the situation anytime soon,” Antunes said.

“In fact, it likely is going to continue to get worse.”

While Canada has secured smaller trade wins, including a recent agreement with China that benefits the agriculture sector, Antunes said those deals are not enough to offset restricted access to the U.S. market, which still accounts for roughly three-quarters of Canada’s total trade.

“The trade deal is an absolute necessity for the auto sector. We are hopeful that we’ll see some signs or some settlement of a trade deal, but we’re not seeing that pan out in terms of increases until next year,” said Antunes.

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Trump said tariffs would bring factories ‘roaring back.’ So why are manufacturing jobs on the decline?

Just before President Trump announced his sweeping tariffs on “Liberation Day” last spring, the White House celebrated February’s gain of 10,000 manufacturing jobs, noting that more than 100,000 positions in the sector had been shed in the final year of the Biden administration.

“Manufacturing is Roaring Back,” the White House website declared.

But such gains were short-lived. Manufacturing jobs began to slide again in May and haven’t stopped declining. 72,000 manufacturing positions have been lost since April’s tariffs announcement, including 8,000 roles in December alone.

What gives?

“What we’re seeing is certainly a continuation of trends that began before the Trump administration,” Gordon Hanson, an economist and professor in urban policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Yahoo Finance. “But the tariffs haven’t helped.”

Indeed, millions of manufacturing jobs have disappeared from the US since 1979 amid a combination of “powerful” trends, Hanson said, including automation, “the continuing effects of the China trade, and the fact that the US has not done a lot of the things you need to do to restore manufacturing prowess.”

Tariffs are hardly the solution to those problems, Hanson said — though Trump insists otherwise. He vowed in April that jobs and factories would “come roaring back into our country” as levies on imports boosted locally produced goods.

While tariffs do reduce import competition, they can also increase the cost of key components for domestic manufacturers. Take US electric vehicle plants that rely on batteries made with rare earth elements imported from overseas, for instance. Some parts simply aren’t made in the United States.

Read more: What are rare earth minerals, and why are they important?

As for sectors that had already largely left the US, like apparel and textile manufacturing, “a lot of those industries are just substantially gone,” Hanson said, meaning there aren’t many existing factories where production could be ramped up and hires could be made.

Do you have a story about navigating the job market? Reach out to Emma Ockerman here.

Manufacturing is hardly the only industry to add few workers these days: Job growth remains paltry across the board, and what hiring does exist is largely being driven by the healthcare and social assistance sectors.

President Trump tours the assembly line at the Ford River Rouge Complex on Jan. 13 in Dearborn, Mich. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) · Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images

Then there’s the uncertainty caused by the administration’s whipsawing tariff policies, which can lead employers to pull back on hiring as they await greater clarity.

“If Trump just picked a number — whatever it was, 10% or 15% to 20% — we might all say it’s bad, I’d say it’s bad, I think most economists would say it’s bad,” Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said. “But the worst thing is there’s no certainty about it.”

Story Continues

Trump’s tariff threats against several European nations as he sought control of Greenland, for example, appeared and abated within a matter of days, injecting some volatility into the stock market in the process.

Read more: How Trump’s tariffs affect your money

With rates “constantly changing, what becomes very difficult for businesses is to plan,” Baker added. “I think you’ve had a lot of businesses curtail investment plans because they just don’t know whether the plans will make sense.”

Manufacturing job losses could also be more severe than they appear in preliminary data. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in December that federal statistics may have overstated job growth by “about 60,000” per month.

It’s “too early to say with any certainty” that these manufacturing jobs would be around if not for the tariffs, Baker noted, but there’s also “zero evidence” that they came charging back.

To be sure, the Biden administration also claimed a renaissance in manufacturing jobs, but that was after massive job destruction in 2020. Though employment in the sector eventually jumped above pre-pandemic levels, the growth was uneven regionally and lagged growth in other sectors, the Economic Innovation Group said in a 2024 analysis. Still, spending on manufacturing construction boomed following the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, 2022 CHIPS Act, and 2022 inflation reduction bill.

That spending declined in 2025.

But, tariffs or no tariffs, a manufacturing employment boom would be difficult to construct.

As a country develops, manufacturing might first rise as a share of employment, but “in every single industrial economy” it declines steadily after a certain point, Robert Lawrence, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and professor of international trade and investment at the Harvard Kennedy School, said.

“It doesn’t matter if you have a trade deficit or a trade surplus,” Lawrence said.

Consumers use the money they save on cheaper goods and spend it on services, where there’s more employment growth. That’s what’s happened in the US, where payroll gains for 2025 were concentrated in services like healthcare, food services, and social assistance.

“I think this is deep,” Lawrence said. “We’ve tried industrial policy, we’ve tried trade protection — even before Trump’s initiatives and Liberation Day tariffs — and we haven’t seen much recovery at all. If anything, it continues to decline.”

Emma Ockerman is a reporter covering the economy and labor for Yahoo Finance. You can reach her at emma.ockerman@yahooinc.com.

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US warns South Korea and Taiwan of 100% tariffs if they refuse to invest in American manufacturing

Howard Lutnick. Photo: Bloomberg

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick issued an ultimatum to leading global semiconductor manufacturers. During an event in New York State on Friday, January 16, 2026, he made it clear that access to the American market for Taiwanese and South Korean companies would depend on their willingness to build factories within the United States. This was reported by Bloomberg, writes UNN.

Details

The Trump administration plans to use tax pressure as the main incentive for relocating high-tech facilities. Lutnick emphasized that companies that ignore calls for investment will face a doubling of the cost of their products at the border.

Everyone who wants to create memory has two options: they can pay a 100% tariff or build in America. If they don’t build in America, the tariff will likely be 100%.

– stated Howard Lutnick.

Who is the pressure aimed at?

The warning primarily concerns the market leaders in memory chips and components for artificial intelligence:

• Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix (South Korea);

• TSMC and other leading Taiwanese firms.

This statement was made against the backdrop of the groundbreaking ceremony for a giant factory of the American company Micron Technology, which is already investing billions of dollars in the development of domestic production in New York.

New White House strategy

Although President Donald Trump has so far refrained from immediately imposing tariffs on semiconductors, the Department of Commerce is already conducting aggressive negotiations with partners. The administration’s goal is to radically reduce U.S. dependence on imports of critical technologies and restore the dominance of American industry. 

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Trump Administration Slaps 25% Tariffs on High-End NVIDIA and AMD AI Chips to Force US Manufacturing

In a move that marks the most aggressive shift in global technology trade policy in decades, President Trump signed a national security proclamation yesterday, January 14, 2026, imposing a 25% tariff on the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence semiconductors. The order specifically targets NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) and AMD (NASDAQ: AMD), hitting their flagship H200 and Instinct MI325X chips. This “Silicon Surcharge” is designed to act as a financial hammer, forcing these semiconductor giants to move their highly sensitive advanced packaging and fabrication processes from Taiwan to the United States.

The immediate significance of this order cannot be overstated. By targeting the H200 and MI325X—the literal engines of the generative AI revolution—the administration is signaling that “AI Sovereignty” now takes precedence over corporate margins. While the administration has framed the move as a necessary step to mitigate the national security risks of offshore fabrication, the tech industry is bracing for a massive recalibration of supply chains. Analysts suggest that the tariffs could add as much as $12,000 to the cost of a single high-end AI GPU, fundamentally altering the economics of data center builds and AI model training overnight.

The Technical Battleground: H200, MI325X, and the Packaging Bottleneck

The specific targeting of NVIDIA’s H200 and AMD’s MI325X is a calculated strike at the “gold standard” of AI hardware. The NVIDIA H200, built on the Hopper architecture, features 141GB of HBM3e memory and is the primary workhorse for large language model (LLM) inference. Its rival, the AMD Instinct MI325X, boasts an even larger 256GB of usable HBM3e memory, making it a critical asset for researchers handling massive datasets. Until now, both chips have relied almost exclusively on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM) for fabrication using 4nm and 5nm process nodes, and perhaps more importantly, for “CoWoS” (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) advanced packaging.

This order differs from previous trade restrictions by moving away from the “blanket bans” of the early 2020s toward a “revenue-capture” model. By allowing the sale of these chips but taxing them at 25%, the administration is effectively creating a state-sanctioned toll road for advanced silicon. Initial reactions from the AI research community have been a mixture of shock and pragmatism. While some researchers at labs like OpenAI and Anthropic worry about the rising cost of compute, others acknowledge that the policy provides a clearer, albeit more expensive, path to acquiring hardware that was previously caught in a web of export-control uncertainty.

Winners, Losers, and the “China Pivot”

The implications for industry titans are profound. NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) and AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) now face a complex choice: pass the 25% tariff costs onto customers or accelerate their multi-billion dollar transitions to domestic facilities. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) stands to benefit significantly from this shift; as the primary domestic alternative with established fabrication and growing packaging capabilities in Ohio and Arizona, Intel may see a surge in interest for its Gaudi-line of accelerators if it can close the performance gap with NVIDIA.

For cloud giants like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), the tariffs represent a massive increase in capital expenditure for their international data centers. However, a crucial “Domestic Exemption” in the order ensures that chips imported specifically for use in U.S.-based data centers may be eligible for rebates, further incentivizing the concentration of AI power within American borders. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the order is the “China Pivot”—a policy reversal that allows NVIDIA and AMD to sell H200-class chips to Chinese firms, provided the 25% tariff is paid directly to the U.S. Treasury and domestic U.S. demand is fully satisfied first.

A New Era of Geopolitical AI Fragmentation

This development fits into a broader trend of “technological decoupling” and the rise of a two-tier global AI market. By leveraging tariffs, the U.S. is effectively subsidizing its own domestic manufacturing through the fees collected from international sales. This marks a departure from the “CHIPS Act” era of direct subsidies, moving instead toward a more protectionist stance where access to the American AI ecosystem is the ultimate leverage. The 25% tariff essentially creates a “Trusted Tier” of hardware for the U.S. and its allies, and a “Taxed Tier” for the rest of the world.

Comparisons are already being drawn to the 1980s semiconductor wars with Japan, but the stakes today are vastly higher. Critics argue that these tariffs could slow the global pace of AI innovation by making the necessary hardware prohibitively expensive for startups in Europe and the Global South. Furthermore, there are concerns that this move could provoke retaliatory measures from China, such as restricting the export of rare earth elements or the HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) components produced by firms like SK Hynix that are essential for these very chips.

The Road to Reshoring: What Comes Next?

In the near term, the industry is looking toward the completion of advanced packaging facilities on U.S. soil. Amkor Technology (NASDAQ: AMKR) and TSMC (NYSE: TSM) are both racing to finish high-end packaging plants in Arizona by late 2026. Once these facilities are operational, NVIDIA and AMD will likely be able to bypass the 25% tariff by certifying their chips as “U.S. Manufactured,” a transition the administration hopes will create thousands of high-tech jobs and secure the AI supply chain against a potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

Experts predict that we will see a surge in “AI hardware arbitrage,” where secondary markets attempt to shuffle chips between jurisdictions to avoid the Silicon Surcharge. In response, the U.S. Department of Commerce is expected to roll out a “Silicon Passport” system—a blockchain-based tracking mechanism to ensure every H200 and MI325X chip can be traced from the fab to the server rack. The next six months will be a period of intense lobbying and strategic realignment as tech companies seek to define what exactly constitutes “U.S. Manufacturing” under the new rules.

Summary and Final Assessment

The Trump Administration’s 25% tariff on NVIDIA and AMD chips represents a watershed moment in the history of the digital age. By weaponizing the supply chain of the most advanced silicon on earth, the U.S. is attempting to forcefully repatriate an industry that has been offshore for decades. The key takeaways are clear: the cost of global AI compute is going up, the “China Ban” is being replaced by a “China Tax,” and the pressure on semiconductor companies to build domestic capacity has reached a fever pitch.

In the long term, this move may be remembered as the birth of true “Sovereign AI,” where a nation’s power is measured not just by its algorithms, but by the physical silicon it can forge within its own borders. Watch for the upcoming quarterly earnings calls from NVIDIA and AMD in the weeks ahead; their guidance on “tariff-adjusted pricing” will provide the first real data on how the market intends to absorb this seismic policy shift.

This content is intended for informational purposes only and represents analysis of current AI developments.

TokenRing AI delivers enterprise-grade solutions for multi-agent AI workflow orchestration, AI-powered development tools, and seamless remote collaboration platforms.
For more information, visit https://www.tokenring.ai/.

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Tariffs and Deportations – Will They Revive U.S. Manufacturing?

The good news: Tariffs can increase overall U.S. manufacturing employment in the long run. The bad news: Tariffs are likely to reduce U.S. manufacturing employment in the short term, and to cause more reallocation of workers across individual sectors than bring overall employment growth.

Moreover, employment could fall sharply in the short run and remain depressed for many years before it eventually recovers, due to supply-chain adjustment frictions.

That’s the conclusion from Joseph B. Steinberg, in his recent paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), titled “Tariffs, Manufacturing Employment, and Supply Chains.”

Steinberg is a professor at the University of Toronto’s economics department, and an NBER Research Associate in the International Finance and Macroeconomics program.

Regarding the overall economic impact of tariffs, Steinberg says that, while they can increase employment of people making goods such as toys, the tradeoff is that the economy would shrink. If tariffs were levied mostly on, say, “upstream” or non-finished materials for which demand fluctuates in line with price (e.g. gasoline), economic output would increase, but then that would cause a fall in employment. All in all, it appears impossible to use tariffs to both increase manufacturing employment and simultaneously improve the overall economy, Steinberg concludes.

The models Steinberg has run worsen if other countries retaliate with symmetrical tariffs, with overall employment in the U.S. goods sector dropping slightly in the long run, and falling almost twice as much in the short run. Only specific sectors with “high elasticity” — goods and services that see significant changes in consumer demand or supply in response to even small changes in price, such as toys — would experience a long-run gain in employment. “Thus, reindustrialization through tariffs hinges on the rest of the world not retaliating,” Steinberg warns.

A similar conundrum comes with the impact on jobs and the economy of the deportation of workers who do not have legal employment status — another high-profile target of the Trump administration. 

The U.S. has long tolerated the fact that a huge proportion of workers in the agriculture, construction and hospitality industries are working illegally, what a 2004 Boston Globe editorial called “the dirty little secret of the American economy.” For example, more than 40% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented immigrants, according to a 2022 report by the US Department of Agriculture. In California, more than 75% are undocumented, according to the University of California, Merced. 

Read More: U.S. Tariff and Deportation Policies on Collision Course in Agribusiness

A July 2025 report from the Economic Policy Institute by Ben Zipperer finds that, if the Trump administration follows through on its goals of deporting 4 million people over four years, there will be 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed U.S.-born workers at the end of that period.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but the research is solid, says Zipperer. For example, aggressive deportations can cause a sharp and abrupt enough fall in labor supply that some employers will respond by shutting down operations entirely. This has been clearly seen already in small businesses such as restaurants that serve farming communities in Southern California and the Rio Grande agricultural regions, for example, where fear of ICE crackdowns has kept their customers and employees at home. 

Zipperer points to an earlier, ambitious U.S. immigration enforcement program, “Secure Communities,” that began in 2008 under the administration of President W.H. Bush, which resulted in around 1.2 million deportations that year.  (The Clinton administration still holds the record for numbers of deportations in a single year, at close to 1.9 million in 2000.) Increased immigration-related arrests and deportations reduced the number of childcare facilities, harming both immigrant and U.S.-born employment in the childcare sector, as well as the ability for those who rely on childcare to work, whether U.S. or foreign born.

Further, Zipperer says, the rising threat of arrest or deportation makes it harder for immigrants to find new employment opportunities that do not risk their ability to stay in the U.S., compelling them to stay with a bad or law-breaking employer. With shrinking alternative job options, immigrants are forced to settle for lower wages and poor working conditions. These deteriorating conditions drag down wages and conditions for all workers, Zipperer says. Employment will decline for U.S.-born workers, he adds, as they are less likely to work at jobs with falling wage rates.

Another argument in favor of widespread deportation is that illegal immigrants sap state and federal resources. But, according to U.S. News & World Report, research has shown that immigrants pay more in federal taxes than they receive in government benefits.

“The available evidence suggests that immigration leads to more innovation, a better educated workforce, greater occupational specialization, better matching of skills with jobs, and higher overall economic productivity,” concludes a 2016 report from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, republished by U.S. Congress in January 2024.

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