It is extremely rare for manufacturers to absorb the tariffs.
Profit margins in most industries simply aren't high enough to cover it. A business can't absorb 20-25% tariffs if its profit margin is only 5%.
And manufacturing is particularly known for its low profit margins.
So no. I mean, in theory you are technically correct. But the way elasticity works in practice is that the buyer is who pays the tariffs in virtually all circumstances.
Is your reasoning that the supplier has the option of eating the tariff by cutting prices, such that the price paid by the purchaser remains the same?
If they had that much margin headroom available to cut prices by 20% and remain profitable, wouldn't that basically prove that they weren't dumping product in the first place?
For suppliers with fixed costs there are strong incentives to lower prices to stimulate demand sufficient to maintain utilization where possible. The commodity NAND market is an example of this. The fabs are extremely sensitive to utilization which leads to wild profit and loss swings.
sure, and a good baseline assumption for most consumer goods is that price elasticity of demand is pretty low in the short term, so consumers pay most of the tariff. then in the long run perhaps things change and more non-tariffed substitutes become available resulting in maybe a 50/50 split of "who pays" (after all, the substitutes didn't have comparative advantage before, so are probably a bit more costly to produce). in any case, total quantity sold will be less, consumers benefit less, and suppliers benefit less... but the government does get revenue.
