How Pro AV Is Trying To Navigate All The Tariffs Uncertainty: AVIXA Experts

April 17, 2025 by Dave Haynes

The pro AV trade association AVIXA has a market intelligence team that steadily looks at the U.S. and global business from key angles like growth and overall health, as well as the impacts of factors like supply chain (huge during the COVID era) and most recently, tariffs.

They do a video podcast called Exceptional Insights, featuring in-house experts Sean Wargo and Peter Hansen, and the latest one zeroes in on the pinballing tariff situation. 

The video is here, and embedded at the bottom of this post as well. But for those people who don’t have time to sit, listen and/or watch, here’s a round-up of what they say about the current situation and potential impacts that affect specifiers, sellers and buyers of digital signage, DOOH and other commercial AV technologies.

Uncertainty rules

AVIXA’s market intelligence team suggests the biggest current impact of tariffs coming out of the White House isn’t necessarily the import fees themselves, but the unpredictability surrounding them. “It’s less that tariffs are in place and prices are adjusting through the channel,” explains Hansen. “The bigger issue is we don’t really know what the tariff picture is going to be. There’s a lot of changes happening very frequently.”

That uncertainty makes planning next to impossible for everyone in the supply chain. How are projects accurately budgeted and targets and timelines set when the economic landscape keeps shifting?

AVIXA’s analysts suggest several key factors are directly affecting the industry:

• Additional taxes on Chinese imports: With a significant portion of Pro AV equipment manufactured in China, tariffs translate to increased costs that are ultimately reflected in final prices. While a supplier or reseller might find a way to “eat” a 10% cost hike, anything higher is very likely going to be passed on to the buyer;
• Steel and aluminum tariffs create complications particularly when components use mixed-source materials, and will add to pricing;
• Tariffs on Mexico and Canada affect alternative supply routes that the industry has used;
• Global equilibrium effects: Products that get diverted from US markets because of the situation – so China sells to EU countries instead – can impact prices in other regions, creating ripple effects throughout the global supply chain.

Hansen and Wargo suggest the industry’s response is caution. While some manufacturers and distributors are stocking up on inventory, they may not be  making big decisions because of the prevailing unpredictability. “Our industry has been a little bit more hesitant. The main response has been ‘I’m not going to try to out-guess this situation. I’m just going to adjust prices and pass them on.'”

The two note that the pandemic experience somewhat prepared the industry for this new situation. End-users are more conditioned to flexible contracts that factor in pricing uncertainty, and suppliers are now better at structuring agreements that protect all parties.

Getting necessarily creative

They say the more forward-thinking companies out there are finding ways to minimize impacts:

• Distributing costs across multiple countries: Companies can locate certain costs (design, marketing, support) in the U.S. while manufacturing elsewhere, which can reduce the portion of costs subject to tariffs;
• Alternative tech choices: The equation might get tilted on tariffs depending on variables like installation costs, with Hansen giving the example of spec’ing direct view LED versus flat panels (I wasn’t sure on this one, but maybe he’s referring to all-in-one LED video walls that show up pretty much built and ready to go, so higher tariff and cost, versus cabinets that get stacked and tiled during installation);
• Emphasizing value-add: Boosting revenue-generating in-country services that are not subject to tariffs can maybe offset increased hardware costs.

Hansen says tariffs act as “a difficulty multiplier for people in the channel, but there’s an extent to which business is a zero-sum game. If you are handling this difficulty multiplier better than your competitors, it can be a win. It can be market share.”

So much for post-COVID renormalization

Overall, Wargo says the industry was getting back to normal after the pandemic and the expectations were for high growth in 2025. But that’s been tempered by all this. “We really had thought that 2024 was kind of a dip in growth and that 2025 we might start to see a rebound,” says Sean Wargo. “The reality is 2025 is looking like a further decline in growth rate, by probably a couple points off of where we were. So if it was 6.5%, maybe it’s more like 4.5%.”

There could also now be a recession, and the economic uncertainty makes it critical for companies to regularly review and tweak their projections and market assessments.

Hansen suggests there may be some silver linings, drawing on what happened during the 2008-9 recession. When expensive new commercial construction projects were cancelled, lower cost alternatives were often done instead – like big AV upgrades to an existing space. Much lower CAPEX, kind of like a new coat of paint.

Wargo says the sector has already shown some nimbleness because of COVID, doing things like pivoting toward hybrid work and broadcast solutions when workplaces and in-person events declined. “Our palette, our available set of solutions is so extensive,” Wargo notes. “There’s plenty of places—digital signage, learning, conferencing, broadcast, security, surveillance—that we remain robust against a lot of those shocks.”