Shoe Retailer Steve Madden to Slash China Imports by 45% After Trump’s Landslide Election

Shoe retailer Steve Madden said the company will reduce its operations in China by up to 45% after Trump’s landslide victory.

In response to President Trump’s promise to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, Steve Madden CEO Edward Rosenfeld said on an earnings call on Thursday that the company will slash its imports from China.

“As of yesterday morning, we are putting that plan into motion,” Edward Rosenfeld said on an earnings call on Thursday, CNBC reported. “And you should expect to see the percentage of goods that we sourced from China to begin to come down more rapidly going forward.”

Excerpt from CNBC:

Steve Madden said Thursday that it will slash the goods it imports from China by as much as 45% over the next year as it braces for President-elect Donald Trump to carry out his pledge for steep tariffs on imports from other countries.

On an earnings call, CEO Edward Rosenfeld said the shoe brand has been “planning for a potential scenario in which we would have to move goods out of China more quickly.” Over the past few years, he said, it’s looked for factories in other countries, including Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico and Brazil.

Rosenfeld said imports to the U.S. account for about two-thirds of Steve Madden’s business. Of that, he said, “we currently source a little bit more than 70% of those goods from China.” That means slightly less than half of its business would be at risk of tariffs on Chinese imports, he said.

“Our goal over the next year is to reduce that percentage of goods that we sourced from China by approximately 40% to 45%, which means that if we’re able to achieve that and we think we have the plan to do it, that a year from today, we would be looking at just over a quarter of our business that would be subject to potential tariffs on Chinese goods,” he said.

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