Yahoo! News | Report: Utah exports topped $18B last year, supported 70K jobs

Photo Credit: Brice Tucker, Deseret News

BY ART RAYMOND

Those business uncertainties were highlighted earlier this week in discussions featuring executives from Utah companies during the Crossroads of the World International Trade Summit hosted by Zions Bank and World Trade Center Utah.

Kimberley Honeysett, chief legal officer for Varex Imaging, an independent supplier of X-ray tubes and image processing solutions for medical and security applications, said her company’s strategy of locating manufacturing facilities proximate to customers was being upended by the new tariff policies.

“One of the risks, certainly, for a lot of companies that have both import and export functions is the opposite of what they’re trying to accomplish, pushing U.S. manufacturing outside the U.S.,” Honeysett said. “The risk is it backfires.”

Honeysett explained how trade levies, both those issued by the U.S. and reciprocal actions by other countries, were impacting Varex on both sides of the company’s import/export equation.

“We import goods, we’re the importer of record and we get the tariffs and our prices are increasing,” Honeysett said. “We also export so, on the other side, we get the tariff. From our perspective (the U.S. trade policies) are more harmful than beneficial.”

John Hortin, chief financial officer for Wavetronix, a Utah-based manufacturer of radar traffic detection devices, said the company’s business with China has “dried up” and he and the Wavetronix team are currently navigating trade tariff uncertainty by “biding our time and waiting to see where it will land.”

Hortin said he believes U.S. trade policy would lead to more effective outcomes if implementation was strategic and targeted, rather than broad-based.

“It’s important to be specific rather than broad,” Hortin said. “The rhetoric we’re hearing now is we’ve been taken advantage of across the board. And I’m not sure that’s true. Blanket tariffs, I really think, generate the trade war more than solve problems.”