What America Buys

America’s $440 billion in Chinese imports rests on two pillars. Consumer goods — everything from smartphones to sneakers, furniture to fishing rods — accounted for $214 billion in 2024, or 49% of all Chinese imports. Capital goods — laptops, telecom equipment, industrial machinery, electrical apparatus — accounted for $145 billion, or 33%. Together, these two categories make up 82 cents of every dollar America sends to China for goods.

The remaining 18% is split among industrial supplies and materials ($43 billion — chemicals, metals, plastics), automotive vehicles and parts ($22 billion — mostly parts and components, not finished cars), and food and beverages ($5 billion — seafood, spices, processed foods). These supporting categories matter, but the consumer-and-capital duo drives the relationship.

What makes these numbers remarkable isn’t their size — it’s how different they look from twenty-five years ago. In 1999, consumer goods made up 67% of Chinese imports and capital goods just 22%. By 2018, the split had shifted to 46% consumer and 37% capital. China had moved up the value chain, from stitching t-shirts to assembling iPhones.

The $214 billion in consumer goods is the category most visible to ordinary Americans. The BEA groups these as “consumer goods except food and automotive” — a broad category that spans everything from electronics to apparel, household appliances to sporting goods, pharmaceuticals to furniture.

To understand what’s inside the number, consider a single product: the smartphone. Apple’s iPhone is overwhelmingly assembled in China, primarily at Foxconn’s massive Zhengzhou campus in Henan province, where 350,000 workers produce an estimated 500,000 devices per day during peak season. When one of those phones ships to the United States, customs records the full factory-gate value — roughly $230–$250 for a base model — as a Chinese import. Apple sold an estimated 100 million iPhones in the U.S. in 2024. At $230 per unit, that’s roughly $23 billion in Chinese imports from a single product. Add Samsung phones (many also assembled in China), plus Motorola, OnePlus, and other brands, and smartphones alone account for an estimated $30–$35 billion of the consumer goods total.

But the iPhone statistic misleads in a crucial way. China captures only about $8.46 of that $230 factory-gate cost — roughly 3.6% — in the form of assembly labor and local components. The screen comes from Samsung in South Korea. The processor comes from TSMC in Taiwan. The design, software, and profit margin stay in Cupertino. The BEA counts the whole phone as a “Chinese import,” but the actual Chinese value-added is a fraction of the headline number. Multiply this accounting distortion across millions of laptops, tablets, game consoles, and smart home devices, and the real Chinese content of the $214 billion is almost certainly below $100 billion.

Beyond electronics, the consumer goods basket includes entire categories where China remains the dominant global supplier. Furniture: American homes are furnished with Chinese-made sofas, tables, and mattresses to such a degree that the 2018 tariffs sent prices at Ashley Furniture and Wayfair up 10–15%. Toys: Mattel, Hasbro, and Lego all manufacture heavily in China; an estimated 80% of toys sold in the U.S. are made there. Small appliances: most vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, coffee makers, and microwave ovens are assembled in Guangdong or Zhejiang province. Clothing and footwear: though Vietnam and Bangladesh have gained ground, China still supplies a significant share of fast fashion and athletic shoes.

The consumer goods category peaked at $266 billion in 2022, when post-COVID spending on home goods and electronics surged. By 2024, it had retreated to $214 billion as tariffs bit harder and supply chains shifted. But China’s position is more resilient here than in capital goods — because many consumer categories (toys, small appliances, holiday decorations) require the kind of low-cost, high-volume manufacturing ecosystem that only Guangdong and Zhejiang currently provide at scale.

The bigger story is in capital goods, where China’s position has eroded dramatically. Capital goods — computers, telecom equipment, semiconductors, industrial machinery, electrical apparatus — peaked at $200 billion in 2018. By 2024, they had fallen to $145 billion, a $55 billion decline. That’s a 28% drop in six years.

The decline has a name: supply chain diversification. After the 2018 tariffs, American companies began systematically moving their capital goods procurement away from China. Samsung moved its last China smartphone factory to Vietnam in 2019. Apple began shifting MacBook production to Vietnam and iPad production to India. Dell and HP accelerated laptop assembly in Vietnam and Thailand. Cisco moved networking equipment production to Mexico. The moves weren’t instantaneous — relocating a supply chain takes years — but the data shows the cumulative result: China’s share of U.S. capital goods imports fell from 28.8% in 2018 to 14.9% in 2024.

The most striking shift: Mexico overtook China in capital goods. In 2018, Mexico exported $104 billion in capital goods to the United States versus China’s $200 billion. By 2024, Mexico had surged to $170 billion while China fell to $145 billion. Mexico’s gain was $66 billion — more than China’s entire $55 billion loss. The capital goods didn’t disappear; they moved. Foxconn opened a factory in Chihuahua. Quanta Computer expanded in Ciudad Juárez. Samsung built a $500 million appliance complex in Tijuana. The Mexican border states became, in effect, an extension of the American tech supply chain.

Taiwan’s surge is equally dramatic: from $24 billion in 2018 to $90 billion in 2024 — a $66 billion increase driven almost entirely by TSMC’s advanced semiconductors. As the AI boom exploded demand for cutting-edge chips, and as U.S. export controls blocked Chinese chipmakers from advanced nodes, Taiwan became an even more critical supplier. Vietnam’s capital goods exports to the U.S. grew from $8 billion to $60 billion — an eightfold increase — as Samsung, Intel, and Apple shifted manufacturing there. South Korea rose from $25 billion to $43 billion. Thailand doubled from $15 billion to $35 billion.

Add it up: the five countries that gained most in capital goods — Mexico (+$66B), Taiwan (+$66B), Vietnam (+$52B), South Korea (+$19B), and Thailand (+$21B) — collectively added $224 billion in capital goods exports to the U.S. China lost $55 billion. The math is clear: America didn’t reduce its appetite for imported capital goods. It simply spread the sourcing across more countries. Total U.S. capital goods imports from all countries grew from $693 billion to $971 billion over the period. China’s share shrank even as the pie expanded.

The broadest measure of China’s importance is its share of total U.S. goods imports. In 1999, China supplied 7.9% of everything America bought from the world. That share climbed steadily for two decades, peaking at 21.3% in 2015 — meaning one in every five dollars of American imports went to Chinese suppliers. By 2018, it was still 21.1%. Then the decline began: 17.9% in 2019, 16.4% in 2022, and 13.3% in 2024.

The drop has been steepest in the categories most exposed to tariffs and supply chain security concerns. In consumer goods, China’s share peaked at 38.7% in 2010 and has fallen to 26.6% — still the largest single-country supplier, but no longer dominant. In capital goods, the decline is more dramatic: from 28.8% in 2018 to 14.9%, as the technology supply chain diversified toward Mexico, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia.

The countries gaining at China’s expense divide into two groups. In consumer goods, the biggest winner has been Ireland — not for clothing or electronics, but for pharmaceuticals. Ireland’s consumer goods exports to the U.S. surged from $41 billion in 2018 to $79 billion in 2024, as American drug companies routed more production through their Irish subsidiaries. Vietnam grew from $33 billion to $58 billion in consumer goods, largely in electronics and furniture. India rose from $29 billion to $45 billion, gaining share in textiles, jewelry, and generic pharmaceuticals. Mexico added $10 billion.

In capital goods, the winners are countries with strong tech manufacturing bases. Mexico’s dominance reflects its geographic advantage: a factory in Monterrey or Juárez can truck components to a Texas distribution center overnight. Taiwan’s surge is a one-company story — TSMC supplies the most advanced chips in the world, and demand for those chips has exploded. Vietnam’s eightfold increase reflects deliberate corporate strategy: Samsung now makes more smartphones in Vietnam than in any other country, and its Bac Ninh and Thai Nguyen factories have become the company’s primary production hub.

The tariff rounds of 2018–2019 were not applied equally across categories. The first $34 billion tranche (July 2018) targeted industrial machinery, electronic components, and medical devices — capital goods, not consumer products. The second $16 billion tranche (August 2018) hit semiconductors, plastics, and chemicals. It wasn’t until the third tranche — $200 billion at 10% in September 2018, later raised to 25% in May 2019 — that consumer goods entered the crosshairs. And even then, smartphones, laptops, and game consoles were initially exempted, only to be hit with a separate 15% tariff in September 2019 (later reduced to 7.5% under the Phase One deal).

This sequencing explains why capital goods fell faster than consumer goods. Capital goods faced tariffs first and at higher rates, giving companies more time and incentive to shift production. Consumer goods tariffs came later, at lower rates, and with more exemptions. The result: capital goods imports from China fell 28% from 2018 to 2024, while consumer goods fell only 14%.

The 2025 tariffs — reportedly as high as 145% on some categories — are expected to accelerate the consumer goods shift. At 145%, even products where China has a large cost advantage become uncompetitive. The quarterly data from Q2 2025 already shows the impact: total Chinese imports collapsed from $113 billion to $69 billion in a single quarter. If consumer goods follow the capital goods playbook, the $214 billion figure for 2024 may prove to be a plateau before a sharper decline. The question is whether Vietnam, India, and Mexico can absorb the volume — and whether American consumers will notice higher prices on the shelves.