The Global Electronics Association just formed the Global Electronics Policy Council. Jabil, Flex, Plexus, TSMC, TTM Technologies, and AT&S are inaugural members. Thomas Cetta, Senior VP at Jabil, chairs the council. Five priorities are on the agenda: market access, domestic manufacturing investment, workforce pipelines, technical standards, and collaborative R&D.
This concerted effort includes formal bylaws, regional arms covering North America, Europe, East Asia, and India/Southeast Asia. Quarterly reporting and approved policy positions. This is real industry structure, not a loose industry coalition.
But the question mid-market OEMs should be asking is, what does this do for us?
Who sits at the table
GEPC’s member list reads like companies that can afford to have government affairs teams, trade counsel on retainer, and direct access to policymakers in Washington, Brussels, and Taipei. When Section 301 duties shift or a new export control surfaces there are people dedicated to understanding the implications and shaping company response.
A $200M OEM running three EMS programs across two countries does not have those same resources.
The sourcing director at a mid-market medical device company or an industrial controls manufacturer is managing tariff exposure in addition to supplier negotiations, NPI timelines, and scheduled cost reviews. There is no government affairs team, no trade counsel, and no policy council membership.
And yet the tariff exposure is identical. A 25% Section 301 duty hits a $200M OEM’s PCB assemblies the same way it hits Jabil’s. Math doesn’t care about company size.
What GEPC does well
GEPC operates at the policy layer. It advocates for predictable market access, pushes back on competing investment mandates across regions, and builds industry consensus on trade priorities. It’s important work and it matters. When tariff policy shifts, having an organized industry voice at the table produces better outcomes for everyone in the electronics supply chain.
The council will produce formal positions and annual advocacy plans and over time it will probably become a meaningful force in how electronics trade policy is shaped globally. This is valuable for companies with the scale to participate directly.
What GEPC does not do
GEPC does not tell a sourcing manager which of their 400 active part numbers carry compounding duty exposure. It does not calculate how a tariff change on copper clad laminates cascades through PCB fabrication, assembly, and finished product import. It does not model what happens to program margins if a second supplier in Vietnam replaces a primary in Shenzhen, factoring in evaluating and qualification costs, lead time shifts, and duty rate changes across multiple HTS codes.
Policy advocacy and operational tariff management are different problems. One shapes the rules and the other helps individual companies navigate them. Mid-market OEMs need both. GEPC is building the first. The second remains largely unsolved for companies below the enterprise tier.
The operational gap
Large EMS providers and their biggest OEM customers manage tariff exposure through internal tools, consultants, and dedicated trade compliance teams. The cost of this infrastructure is absorbed across billions in revenue and it works at scale. Below that tier, the operational reality is different.
Tariff analysis happens in spreadsheets maintained by one or two people. HTS classifications get verified reactively, usually after a customs broker flags an issue. Landed cost models either don’t exist or rely on assumptions from the last RFQ cycle instead of current duty rates. Scenario planning for sourcing shifts is manual, slow, and rarely updated. This is not a technology gap. The data exists.
HTS schedules are public and duty rates are published and country of origin rules are documented.
The gap is in connecting these data points to specific programs, specific BOMs, and specific sourcing decisions in a way a mid-market sourcing team can actually use without building a custom analytics function from scratch.
What mid-market OEMs actually need
Three capabilities matter for companies managing tariff exposure without enterprise resources:
- Program level tariff visibility – Not country level summaries or industry averages. OEMs need to see duty exposure mapped to their actual part numbers, their actual suppliers, and their actual import pathways. When a tariff changes, the impact should be quantifiable at the BOM level within hours, not weeks.
- Sourcing scenario modeling – Moving a supplier from one country to another changes more than the duty rate. It changes lead times, qualification timelines, logistics costs, and often the cost structure of the EMS relationship managing the new supply path. OEMs need to model these trade offs across multiple variables, not just compare duty rates in isolation.
- Workforce planning for trade complexity – Managing tariff exposure across multi-country supply chains requires coordination across sourcing, compliance, program management, and finance. Many mid-market OEMs understaff this function because the cost drivers are invisible until a problem surfaces. Understanding the indirect labor required to manage tariff complexity is itself a planning problem.
GEPC as a signal
GEPC’s formation confirms what electronics supply chain professionals already know: tariff volatility is not a temporary disruption. It is a permanent operating condition. The council exists because companies at the top of the value chain recognized the need for sustained, organized engagement with trade policy.
For mid-market OEMs, the signal is clear. If Jabil and TSMC are investing in formal tariff policy infrastructure, companies at smaller scale should be investing in operational tariff management tools.
The problems are the same. The resources are different.
The gap between policy advocacy and program level execution is where mid-market OEMs are exposed.
GEPC will make the policy environment more navigable for the industry as a whole. Individual OEMs still need to translate policy into program decisions. The companies closing this gap now will manage tariff volatility as a cost input. The companies ignoring it will keep discovering exposure after the fact, one customs invoice at a time.
