Harnessing Opportunities and Managing Risk in an Unpredictable Trade and Macro Landscape – reflections on the APAC & UAE Market Intelligence Roadshows

• Additionally, users can leverage the power of Credit Analytics’ early warning signal framework, to track the risk trajectory of individual companies that may experience an actual default crystallization within the next 12 months. This traffic-light signal becomes particularly useful to discriminate among a list of companies that have the same probability of default on paper, and pinpoint those where a “hidden” acceleration towards an actual default has been detected.   

Navigating Tariffs with Global Insight (Author: Julian McGrath, Procurement Analytics, in collaboration with key contributors of Global Insight. Contact: julian.mcgrath@spglobal.com )

Powered by macro forecasts, trade intelligence, and real-time insights, we help you anticipate market shifts and navigate uncertainty cause by tariffs. Our expertise delivers sharp, unbiased analysis across commerce, commodities, and supply chains—fueling smarter decisions in cost control, compliance, sourcing, and resilience. Our solutions are spread across:

• Macroeconomic & Risk Environment
• Cost Escalation
• Trade Dynamics
• Sourcing & Suppliers

Macroeconomic & Risk Environment, Macroeconomics

Anticipate the evolving economic impact of tariffs with forward-looking clarity. Our in-depth macroeconomic forecasts—powered by over 400 indicators per country—help you assess how tariff-driven inflation, changing market sentiment, and slower growth are and will affect your business. Stay ahead of cost pressures, monitor shifts in consumer and business confidence, and make smarter, data-driven decisions on pricing, budgeting, financing, and risk management.

This can be applicable to:

• Corporate Strategy & Economists: Leverage consistent economic and risk outlooks along with daily analysis of the latest developments for validation against own assumptions alongside strategic planning and risk management
• Government Agencies: Feed economic and risk analysis and scenarios into considerations and models for policy-making and economic planning

Macroeconomic & Risk Environment, PMI

Do not delay your response to tariffs and shifting economic conditions. With access to accurate, real-time sectoral trends and nowcasts, you can stay ahead of official data releases and make faster, smarter decisions. Optimize asset allocation and business strategies with top-down insights into national performance, productivity, and pricing across 34 key sectors. Monitor timely indicators on interest rates, inflation, growth, and commodity fundamentals to adapt to the evolving tariff landscape and uncover new opportunities, supporting informed decisions on investment, planning, and policy in a rapidly changing global economy.

This can be applicable to:

• Portfolio Managers: Need to predict market trends and economic conditions to drive investment decisions and generate alpha
• Economists/Strategists/Analysts: Use PMI for economic nowcasting, curating sector specific views and for signals into financial market developments
• Corporate Strategists: Require insights for strategic planning and risk management to fine tune their business strategy, benchmark performance and navigate changing supply chains

Macroeconomic & Risk Environment, Country Risk Assessments

Help remove tariff threats to your supply chain stability. Gain forward-looking insight with dynamic scoring, one- and three-year forecasts across 211 countries, and hyper-local risk assessments. Backed by expert analysis across political, economic, legal, taxation, operational, and security domains, you’ll stay ahead of global shifts and make confident, informed decisions around strategic investment and policy.

This can be applicable to:

• Corporate Security Teams: Monitor security risks to facilities and personnel
• Government Agencies: Need to analyze and monitor security, geopolitical and economic risks and impact to national security
• Insurance Underwriters: Need to assess and price risk of political violence at the location level for when they are insuring proprty or projects against risk of unrest, terrorism or war

Cost Escalation, Pricing & Purchasing

Tariffs on material inputs should not lead to the full cost being passed onto your manufactured or purchased goods. With access to over 4,000 price forecasts, cost models, buying recommendations and analyst expertise to challenge unjustified cost increases by understanding regional price variations, cost escalation in context and the impact on supplier negotiations and budgeting. Benchmark cost escalation and time buys to achieve prevent unwarranted increases. 

This can be applicable to:

• Corporate and Government Procurement: Need to optimize purchasing strategies and ensure they are paying a fair and reasonable price, requiring insights into cost escalation and drivers behind movements and broader market conditions
• Finance Managers: Track long term project and investment costs tied to inflation and budget controls

Trade Dynamics, Global Trade Atlas

Tariffs should not obscure the true cost and impact of global trade. With visibility into 98% of global trade activity, you can analyze transactions by volume, value, and unit price to compare international markets with precision. Monitor tariffs paid on U.S. imports with per-unit cost breakdowns and uncover hidden expenses through our comprehensive trade database. By combining macro trade statistics with granular transactional data, you gain actionable insights into tariff-driven cost shifts—empowering smarter decisions on pricing, sourcing, and global trade strategy.

This can be applicable to:

• Corporate Sourcing Teams: Identify new buyers and suppliers; Conduct competitive market research; Forecast supply chain needs
• Logistics Managers: Understand market share by trade lane; expand customer relationships; analyze competition landscape; identify new markets
• Financial (Buyside): Evaluate equity investment opportunities; forecast commodity futures; find new prospects; research new investment opportunities
• Government: Faciliate trade; stop illicittrade activities; mitigate trade risk; promote market diversification
• Ports & Ports Authority: Optimize space allocation and fleet makeup; plan new infrastructure; perform due diligence for new investments
• Insurance: GTAS helps in validating trade values against historical patterns and verifying shipment values across commodities

Trade Dynamics, Trade Compliance Secure

Prevent operational disruptions from trade embargoes and export controls. With export control classification, you can evaluate your manufacturing list against evolving dual-use goods regulations and shifting country-specific restrictions. Screen goods across multiple regulatory regimes, assess company profiles from a database of over 55 million entities, and go beyond basic watchlists to analyze corporate buyers. Empowering smarter, more compliant global trade and sourcing decisions.

This can be applicable to:

• Trade Finance Operators: Financial Crime Compliance, Sanctions Compliance: Need to ensure adherence to international trade regulations.
• Export Control Heads: Officers, Analysts: Use data to monitor and secure export control obligations within their manufacturing list
• Logistics Managers: Screen goods, entities, locations and shipment routes to determine risk within individual transactions. Need to be aware of high-risk goods, companies etc

Sourcing & Suppliers, Panjiva

Increase your supplier visibility in the environment of tariffs and trade complexities. With access to detailed cross-border transaction data, including company names, product descriptions, trade values, and more. Strengthen visibility at the company level, spot geographic risk by comparing a supplier’s product concentration with peers, identify trustworthy partners, and avoid high-risk counterparties. Understand your leverage as a buyer, and make informed decisions when expanding or optimizing your global supplier and customer networks

This can be applicable to:

• Corporate Sourcing Teams: Need to identify reliable suppliers and manage vendor relationships
• Logistics Managers: For trade lane analysis and business development
• Financial (Buyside): Require insights for systematic Trading and portfolio management
• Financial (Sellside): Require insights for business development of supply chain offerings and foreign exchange (FX) packages. Private equity can investigate a company, its competitors and its supply chain risk and transactions
• Government: Investigating trade policy impacts on businesses and revenue as well as investigating reliance on foreign trade and supply chain risk

Sourcing & Suppliers, KY3P

Evaluate your sourcing base with access to high-quality global and local supplier data, including private companies, you can seamlessly onboard your entire supplier base. Evaluate financial health, operational resilience, and regulatory compliance across your portfolio, while monitoring by industry, geography, or tier. Stay ahead of emerging risks with real-time alerts and intelligent tools that enhance due diligence, strengthen supplier relationships, and improve operational efficiency.

Selection of some insights around tariffs from GI, taken from our main rolling coverage: US tariff plans landing page on S&P Connect.  A sample of our recent writeups are below:

What happens next with Canada and Mexico?

Canada and Mexico initially responded to Trump’s threats of 25% tariffs with commitments to join the US in providing troops and other support to reduce flows of fentanyl. More recently, Canada has taken a more combative stance with the application of retaliatory duties, while Mexico has taken a more conciliatory approach (see “ Tariff trouble: Canada, Mexico tariff pause covers less than half of trade ”). The question of a renegotiation of the USMCA has yet to be addressed (see “ Tariff troubles: USMCA negotiation on the table early ”).

• Market Intelligence estimates indicate that the tariffs could mean that Mexico’s real GDP growth for 2025 could fall by 0.2% compared with a baseline forecast of 1.25% growth, with a peak drag of 3.1 percentage points in the first quarter of 2026. That includes a 10% reciprocal tariff on imports of a focused range of goods from the US (see “ How 25% tariffs could shake up Mexico’s economic landscape ”).

How has mainland China responded?

The mainland Chinese government has applied a series of new trade measures in apparent response to duties applied by Trump (see “ Tariff trouble: Mainland China responds to US reciprocal tariffs with complete US export coverage ”).

• The tariffs announced in February and March cover US$33.9 billion in trade including US$4.5 billion of coal and natural gas at a 15% rate, US$12.1 billion of soybeans, US$6.0 billion of crude oil at 10% and a range of agricultural machinery and vehicles at 10%. The measures appear calibrated, covering 13.4% of mainland China’s imports from the US in 2024.
• The fourth round of 125% tariffs, effective April 12, covers all imports from the US valued at US$163 billion in 2024, representing a substantial increase compared with the previous three rounds.
• Aside from a new range of tariffs, since the start of 2025, the government has also placed 59 US companies on export control lists; 37 US companies, including PVH Corp. and Illumina Inc. (which have maintained that they comply with all rules and regulations) on the Unreliable Entities List (UEL); and five US tech companies, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Apple Inc. under antitrust investigation; and applied new critical minerals exportmits (see “ Tariff trouble: Mainland China reacts to second round of US tariffs with tariffs on food, cotton ”).
• The use of the UEL for the first time outside the defense sector indicates that it will become a more commonly used part of the government’s policy toolkit. Aside from limiting sales in the country, the assignation could limit mainland Chinese firms’ willingness to supply overseas.
• However, the Chinese government has withdrawn the escalatory rates and may limit other actions in response to negotiations and a 90-day hold on additional tariffs initiated in mid-May 2025.