Jorge H. Martínez, the owner of a small Mexican company near the U.S. border, has seen how President Trump’s threats of steep tariffs have upended markets, bent geopolitics and thrown businesses into uncertainty.
He’s thrilled about it.
As much of Mexico’s business world worried over the nightmare outcomes that tariffs could cause, Mr. Martínez saw an opportunity.
“In a crisis, if you’re prepared, you win,” Mr. Martínez, 40, said as he sat in his office above the hum and clank of machines spitting out tiny plastic parts by the dozen. “Truth is, this whole thing benefited us.”
He is the chief executive of Micro Partes, which has about 50 employees in the industrial city of Monterrey. They create a tiny universe of straps, plugs, fasteners, grommets, zip ties and clamps — objects that are critical to many production lines but that most people don’t give a second thought to, if they notice them at all. The products include a hollow ring to protect cables as they pass through walls, a lid to cover the heads of the washing-machine screws, and buttons to hold advertisements on shopping carts.
Mr. Martínez has long faced steep competition from China, where many of these parts are made cheaply.
But now that it’s no longer cheap to import them, his company is part of a trend: Businesses are searching high and low for local suppliers, mostly in northern Mexico, to source the components they used to import. The search began before Mr. Trump took office, but it has intensified under his threats, benefiting businesses like Mr. Martinez’s.
When Mr. Trump announced tariffs this year, Mexican businesses that send most of their stock to the United States had to adapt to a new trade environment that punished anything not U.S.-made. Some companies took a wait-and-see approach. Others considered moving their manufacturing plants to the United States.
But in March, the Trump administration said tariffs would not apply to imports traded under a free-trade deal signed by the United States and its neighbors to the north and south. At that point, another option became available to manufacturers.
“Make sure your whole process, your whole supply chain is in North America,” said Alberto Villareal, managing director of Nepanoa, a Chicago consulting firm that provides services for companies that want to set up in Mexico, a trend known as nearshoring.
The trilateral trade pact, called the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, was championed by Mr. Trump in his first term. He once called it the “largest, fairest, most balanced and modern trade agreement ever achieved.”
The deal has specific, sometimes complicated, rules for products and industries. But, in general, to qualify for preferential treatment — and to dodge Mr. Trump’s tariffs — a product must be manufactured in one of the three countries, with at least some its materials from there.
So a frantic search began to find local companies making parts that, not long ago, businesses would have imported from other parts of the world, particularly China.
“There was an urgency to locate suppliers in the region and to stop importing from Asia,” Mr. Martínez said.
To prepare, he acquired new machines and found new suppliers for the resin his company used to manufacture the plastic parts. He also stopped using Asia as a source of steel cubes — a key material his workers transform into molds, usually customized for the customer, that shape resin into a screw, a spark plug, a clip.
His company’s sales jumped by 32 percent in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2024. The increase has since slowed, but sales remain higher than last year’s.
Even Asian multinational companies became new customers, like an LG factory in Reynosa, a Samsung plant in Tijuana, and a Chinese appliance and electronics manufacturer called Hisense, with a facility just north of Monterrey.
“Right now, we have $600 million in purchase orders that we’re helping to fill with local suppliers,” said Emmanuel Loo, the economy minister of Nuevo León State, whose capital is Monterrey. His office has been helping multinational corporations find products from Mexican manufacturers, including small businesses such as Micro Partes.
“This is great news for us,” Mr. Loo said. “Local companies now have more opportunities to increase their sales and be more competitive against Asian suppliers.”
Although Mr. Trump has argued his tariffs will restore the manufacturing prowess of the United States, analysts say that their consequences are unclear. With the United States, Canada and Mexico deeply intertwined through trade and investment, analysts say, one way to bolster U.S. manufacturing would be to strengthen production in the region as a whole.
Mr. Martínez is betting on that.
“The North American bloc has to compete against the Red Dragon,” he said in a clear reference to China, known in his industry as the world’s factory. For now, he added, that might mean finding more suppliers like him in Mexico.
“And here we are,” he said, “ready, raising our hand.”
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega is a reporter and researcher for The Times based in Mexico City, covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
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