Companies to Radically Improve Operations Amid to Current Turmoil: Study

““We are in a false moment of calm, but July 9 is right around the corner. While the latest quarterly results may not yet show the impact, companies that fail to act now will see tariffs hit hard in the quarters ahead,” says Joanna Rangarajan, managing director in Alvarez & Marsal’s Consumer and Retail Group and co-author of the study. “They should be looking to identify every opportunity to improve and fortify operations, as those who successfully came out of COVID did.”

“What we are seeing is a shell-shocked level of inactivity. Companies need to use this tariff crisis as an opportunity to do the hard work of getting their SG&A numbers down by 15-20%. Looking at pricing, reaching out to vendor bases and shifting country of origin are no longer enough. This is the perfect moment for management teams to refocus on optimizing their inventory, speeding up calendaring, and ultimately assessing their total cost of tariffs so that they can work toward an equivalent level of budgetary savings,” adds Michael Prendergast, managing director in Alvarez & Marsal’s Consumer and Retail Group.”