Currently, the general outlook for the manufacturing sector seems to be subject to so many proliferating, often mutually contradictory factors that it can feel hopeless to even attempt to assess the overall situation. However, if you try to step back a bit and consider a timeline beyond the last and next few months, the landscape appears less confusing, as the logic of a longer-term trajectory begins to reveal itself.
For instance, while of course not nearly as dramatic as what the second Trump administration announced in its first 100 days, a significant increase in tariffs on China began in the first Trump administration, a policy the Biden administration kept in place. And in May, 2024, President Biden announced his own additional increases to tariffs on China — including up to 100 percent on EVs, up to 50 percent on solar cells, and up to 25 percent on an assortment of other critical imports — which began to go into effect last September.
More broadly, the movement towards localization of American manufacturing that so many commentators in the US and around the world viewed with such skepticism has, in fact, already been happening for years, albeit at a rather gradual pace. One company that exemplifies this trend is the Manufacturing Revitalization Corporation of America (MRCA), founded in 2021 and headed by Jason Azevedo and his brother, Keven, two executives who have been starting businesses together since their teen years.
MRCA has a grand vision that it defines simply: “MRCA aggregates legacy American manufacturing companies to enable long-term business continuity, protect employees, and ensure growth.”
In an interview that fittingly took place the day after President Trump’s self-declared “Liberation Day”, Jason Azevedo, who holds the title of Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at MRCA, summed up the company’s differentiating factor like this:
“We’re basically the antithesis to PE firms that buy manufacturing companies, consolidate them and shut them down,” began Azevedo. “We buy legacy American manufacturing companies, pretty much all of which serve major blue-chip customers all the way down to small clients, and which have usually been around for two or three generations. MRCA comes in and adds the energy as well as processes necessary to make sure the jobs that those companies represent can stay in the areas they’re already in.
One of the reasons that’s so important is because in a large proportion of our facilities, we employ a significant percentage of the working adults in the area, as high as 50 percent for one of the localities where we operate. We’ve been ahead of the curve with our general business strategy, and now we’re seeing that focusing on securing American manufacturing capacity is suddenly the cool thing to do — way more people are trying to figure out how to get into this space. I think a lot of businesses are starting to realize that American manufacturing isn’t just a viable alternative, that in many circumstances it’s in fact the better option.”
Despite the aforementioned near-term confusion triggered by White House tariff policies (and the rest of the world’s responses to those policies), Azevedo in fact sees many positives for US manufacturers in these latest developments. One of those developments in particular is the tariff on steel.
Given the primary significance of steel to the manufacturing sector at large, including the five manufacturing companies in the MRCA portfolio, Azevedo naturally has a particular interest in the Trump administration’s full reinstatement of a 25 percent tariff on US imports of steel that the president originally enacted during his first term in office.
Sources like the US Chamber of Commerce argue that the tariffs on steel and aluminum “[put US manufacturers] at a disadvantage to their global competitors”, largely because of higher costs. On the other hand, Azevedo points out that the high quality of US-made steel enables the domestic supply chain to avoid many of the hidden environmental and, ultimately, financial society-wide costs associated with the mining industry:
“MRCA is a significant consumer of steel — we buy millions of pounds a year,” Azevedo told me. “The bulk of the steel that we buy, maybe 95 percent or so, comes entirely from recycled sources. This is fairly common practice for US steel mills at this point. So this weeds out much of the ecological damage that the extraction and processing of virgin iron ore entails, as well as the cost of having to mine the raw material.
Additionally, there are lower freight costs when you shorten the distance between the producer and the consumer. And for us, at least, buying American has allowed us to establish and maintain more reliable, more beneficial relationships with our suppliers. One angle to that is the level of control and verification that takes place in the US supply chain. Another is simply the rewards that come with loyalty: despite the tariffs going back up, one of my steel vendors just gave me a 3 percent discount because we’ve been with them for a long time.
Again, we’ve been doing this for years. What the tariffs are doing is making a lot of other companies wake up and realize that they need to take a closer look at their supply chains.”
The advantage of localized sourcing of recycled metals has been an increasingly important theme for the additive manufacturing (AM) industry over the last several years, and the emergence of higher tariffs seems like it could be a major catalyst for accelerating interest in printing parts with locally-supplied recycled metal powders.
Meanwhile, other companies in the US manufacturing ecosystem are seeing similar patterns. In an interview published last December, Rob Higby, the CEO of Continuum Powders — which, like MRCA, is based in Texas — told me that the company was already seeing a spike in interest from potential customers, long before the details of Trump’s tariff plans were revealed.
And, in a just-published interview with 3DPrint.com’s Vanesa Listek, Higby explained how a combination of tariff uncertainty and the appeal of Continuum’s circular economic approach landed the company a deal with Siemens Energy. According to Azevedo, the general mood of upheaval should act as a spark for manufacturing operations to try new things, which could be a boon to the AM industry:
“As more and more new plants come online in the US, we’re at one of those moments in time where changes to the old way of doing things can actually take place,” Azevedo said. “If you’ve got a process that’s been sitting somewhere for five or ten or more years, it’s very difficult to say, hey, what if we just change this? But now, because there’s so much other change going on, it’s a genuine opportunity to consider changing other aspects of the process, including the manufacturing technique. So that’s where I think you’ll see the opportunity for techniques including metal additive.
And then of course, there will be cases where tariffs lead to AM becoming a cheaper option. There’s a whole emerging industry of tariff engineering where products are designed in order to minimize the costs yielded by tariffs. It’s kind of like using Google Maps — sometimes the route you usually take might not be the best option because there’s more traffic.”
Beyond the monetary costs associated with manufacturing in one place versus another, one thing Azevedo is truly an expert in is the price communities pay for not having vibrant manufacturing industries. In this sense, culture is perhaps the most important reason why people should care about the health of their domestic manufacturing sector:
“One of the things we look for most when we tour a plant is, how do the people inside the building look when they’re working? If you see a lot of people smiling, joking — if you see camaraderie — we know there’s a good work culture in place, and we know that’s something we want to be a part of.
These are the types of jobs that build communities, and our belief in that idea is what we built MRCA on. People want me to take a harsh line against other countries, but it’s just not true to me. I’m not anti-China. I’m not anti-anything. I’m pro my local community. When there are places of business that can create fulfilled employees, those employees build the communities that people want to live in. There’s nothing more important to me than that single aspect, and historically, you see it in every country where there’s both a lot of manufacturing and a booming middle class.”
Images courtesy of MRCA
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