US imports of consumer electronics face threats to growth plans

(The following story appears in the Top 100 Importers and Exporters issue of the Journal of Commerce magazine to be published May 4, 2026.)

Importers of consumer electronics affected by rising costs on US households in 2025 are facing dual threats to growth prospects in the year ahead: the impact of increased fuel costs on consumer discretionary spending and the skyrocketing price of memory due to demand from data center construction.

That means there might be little respite for consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers after they saw containerized imports of those products dip 2.2% in 2025, according to data from PIERS, a sister product of the Journal of Commerce within S&P Global.

“Energy prices and gas prices, that’s going to be a headline budgetary impact on the average household,” Paul Gagnon, vice president of consumer technology at market research firm Circana, told the Journal of Commerce. “We were already expecting consumer demand to not be great this year and that tariffs would have an impact. But food and other necessary purchases will delay demand for discretionary purchases.”

A potentially bigger headwind for consumer electronics sales is the impact of memory prices. Gagnon said pricing for memory is up 400% year over year in the last few months.

“Data centers use huge amounts of high bandwidth memory and the generators of that memory don’t have bandwidth to supply data centers and lower value memory that goes into consumer products,” he said.

The impact of that dynamic won’t be isolated to the types of products most associated with memory, like laptops and tablets, but will be more widespread since virtually every consumer electronic good now has a memory component.

“Any product that uses a lot of memory will be susceptible,” Gagnon said. “Even things that use memory indirectly, prices will go up.”

Sony, during its fiscal third-quarter earnings call in February, noted the memory cost issue.

“We are already in a position to secure the minimum quantity necessary to manage the year-end selling season of next fiscal year,” Sony Group CFO Lin Tao said. “Going forward, we intend to further negotiate with various suppliers to secure enough [memory] supply to meet the demand of our customers.”

The way these trends manifest into container volume is not entirely clear, but Gagnon cautioned that with prices likely to increase due to the memory cost issue, retailers might see sales stay steady or rise, but on a lower volume of units. That would, in turn, hit import volume.

“It will definitely have a negative impact on volumes,” he said. “Retailers don’t care about volume as much as revenues. And it might be a situation where their revenues hold up because people are willing to pay more or need something and end up having to pay more.”

Sourcing shift

Another sectoral trend affecting volume is changes in sourcing patterns of consumer electronics tied to the size of a product and the composition of parts needed, Gagnon explained.

For instance, television supply chains had long ago shifted production to Mexico, but during 2025 saw even more concentration in that market.

“What had left China had gone to Southeast Asia but even that had moved to Mexico,” Gagnon said. "But the shift to Mexico didn’t happen broadly outside of large physical size products. For smaller products, there’s not a big benefit to have it more local.”

He also said Mexico is suitable to television production because some of the major component parts — metals and plastics — are not as sophisticated as those needed in other consumer product categories.

Meanwhile, historical behavior in the electronics sector suggests that when prices rise, consumers will either put off purchases, whether new or replacement, or they will engage in what Gagnon called “trade down behavior,” choosing a less expensive option if they need to buy.

The forecast for consumer electronics manufacturing is not much better. S&P Global Market Intelligence in late February revised its projection for global production of consumer electronics downward from 5.5% to 4.4%.

The forecast noted that consumer electronics production tends to correlate loosely with global GDP.

“Historically, the industry overperformed the global economy by 1.6 percentage points,” the report said. “Over the last 10 years, the gap between industry and global growth even got wider. The industry grew 5.2% on average per year, over-performing GDP growth by 2.4 percentage points.”

So a tick down from the average growth rate over the past decade would indicate a slowing sector in a slowing economy. US imports of consumer electronics have lost ground three of the last four years, with 2024 being the outlier, according to PIERS data, adding weight to the slowdown theory not being an isolated trend.

While China dominates the supply chain for consumer electronics — it accounted for 53% of global production in 2025 — S&P Global Market Intelligence said the next 10 years will see supply concentration decrease. PIERS data shows that process already occurring, with Vietnam growing its share of US consumer electronic imports from 10.1% in 2020 to 18.1% in 2025, while China’s share decreased from 56.6% to 40.7% in the same period.