‘A Big Shock’: How Bangladesh Woke to News of Trump Tariffs

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“It was a big shock,” said Rubel, an additional managing director at Denim Expert, a jean manufacturer. “We were expecting good growth and good business in the U.S. We never realized that something like this could happen.”

The United States is Bangladesh’s third-largest trading partner after China and India. In 2024, the United States imported $8.4 billion worth of goods from the South Asian nation, which, in turn, received $2.2 billion in American exports...This created a trade surplus of $6.2 billion...that put Bangladesh in the sightlines for what Trump has characterized as “taking advantage” of the United States...

Plenty hinges on this. The orders that had collapsed during that time were showing signs of returning in a pointed swerve from China, which, in the earliest days of the Trump 2.0 administration, had been slapped with 20 percent tariffs that made Bangladesh’s then-15 percent appear like a bargain in comparison...

...goods will undoubtedly get more expensive, which could mean that brands buy less. A number of Bangladesh’s 4,000-plus garment factories... have also organized themselves around making clothing exclusively for the American market...“We are so dependent on the U.S. market,” he said. “This is the bad part of this.”

Md. Fazlul Hoque, managing director of Plummy Fashion, a “green” knitwear manufacturer in Narayanganj, said he worried that the price squeeze from buyers on suppliers will intensify, as has reportedly been the case with certain big-box retailers and their Chinese manufacturers.

“My thinking is that they will not go for a price hike at the retail side,” he said. “Rather, they will pass on the extra tariff percentage to their suppliers, which could mean a huge price pressure even with orders already placed, in production or in transit.”

That would also spell more bad news Bangladesh’s 4 million garment workers, many of them women, who have had to grapple with the loss of support services from civil society organizations hobbled by America’s foreign aid cuts, said Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, a workers’ rights group. She said she’s genuinely worried that this could result in job losses for workers still reeling from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn stoked by Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Faisal Samad, managing director of Savartex Group, a textile manufacturer in Dhaka, as well as a former BGMEA vice president, agreed, saying that the impact will be “very high,” both for U.S. buyers and for factories that conduct significant business with the United States.

“Walmart and Target vendors already have to supply prices that are competitive for the styles that buyers are buying out of Bangladesh,” he said. “Now, with these new tariffs, there will be a significant cost increase on the landed goods. And if tariffs remain, the buyers’ position will be to ask factories to reduce their already tight prices to recover the tariff blow.”...