Mexico Overtook China as America's Top Supplier: What Nearshoring and China+1 Mean for Your Freight in 2026

The world's factory is getting a second address

For two decades, "Made in China" was the default of global trade. That default is loosening. In 2023, according to US Census Bureau data, Mexico overtook China as the top source of goods imported into the United States, the first time that had happened since 2002. Imports from Mexico rose to more than $475 billion, while imports from China fell about 20% to $427 billion. Mexico now supplies roughly 15% of US goods imports, against China's 13%.

This is not a single dramatic break. It is the visible result of years of gradual moves. Since the 2018 tariffs, China's share of US imports has dropped about 7.7 percentage points, with the slack picked up by Vietnam, Mexico, India, and others. The 2025 tariff escalation only accelerated a shift that was already well underway.

China+1, not China-out

The strategy driving this has a name: China+1. The idea is not to leave China, which remains an enormous and efficient manufacturing base, but to add at least one more country alongside it, so that a single disruption, tariff, or shock cannot halt supply. The conversation started around 2013, accelerated after the 2018 tariffs, and intensified sharply from 2025.

Where the "+1" lands depends on what you make and why you are diversifying:

• Mexico wins on proximity to the US. Nearshoring cuts transit from weeks to days, aligns with North American trade rules, and has made Mexican manufacturing a magnet for investment, with foreign direct investment into manufacturing hitting a record $36.1 billion in 2024.
• Vietnam has become an electronics and footwear hub, drawing more than $36 billion of foreign investment in 2025 and building on electronics exports that already topped $165 billion in 2023.
• India is scaling fast in electronics, with manufacturing FDI up 18% in its 2024 to 2025 fiscal year and its share of global iPhone production reaching around 25% in 2025.
• Friendshoring more broadly steers production toward political allies, spreading risk across a wider set of partners rather than concentrating it in one place.

Why nearshoring changes the freight problem

Moving production closer or spreading it wider does not simplify logistics. In many ways it complicates them. A supply base that used to run through a handful of Chinese ports now runs through many:

• More origins and lanes. Sourcing from Mexico, Vietnam, and India at once means managing three very different freight geographies, from cross-border trucking to trans-Pacific ocean to air, instead of one.
• More modes and carriers. Nearshoring to Mexico leans on road and rail; an Asia +1 leans on ocean and air. Each mode and carrier brings its own tracking, documents, and quirks.
• New chokepoints. Shifting volume creates new pressure points, from congested border crossings to fast-growing ports that are still scaling their capacity.
• Shorter but tighter timelines. Nearshoring shrinks transit time, which is the point, but shorter lead times leave less buffer, so a delay that was absorbable over a five-week ocean voyage can break a five-day cross-border run.

In other words, diversifying your suppliers to reduce risk in one place can quietly add risk in another: the risk of losing sight of your freight as it scatters across more routes, modes, and systems than before.

Visibility is what holds a diversified supply chain together

The whole point of China+1 is resilience, being able to absorb a shock without stopping. But resilience only works if you can see what is happening across the entire network. A diversified supply base you cannot track is not resilient. It is just fragmented.

That makes unified visibility the connective tissue of a nearshoring strategy. Watching every shipment, across every origin, mode, and carrier, in a single place means the complexity of a spread-out supply base does not turn into blind spots. A delay on a Vietnamese ocean lane and a hold at a Mexican border crossing show up the same way, early enough to act on, instead of hiding in separate portals until they become problems.

How to move with the sourcing shift

Whether you are early or late to diversifying, a few principles keep the freight side sound:

• Map your real freight footprint. As sourcing spreads, know exactly which origins, lanes, modes, and carriers you now depend on, because you cannot manage a network you have not mapped.
• Standardise visibility across modes. Ocean, air, and cross-border road should surface in one place, with consistent milestones and ETAs, so no lane is a blind spot just because it is new.
• Respect the tighter timelines. Nearshoring's shorter transit is an advantage only if you protect it. Watch the short lanes as closely as the long ones, because they have less slack.
• Watch the new chokepoints. Border crossings and fast-growing ports can congest as volume shifts, so keep an eye on the pressure points your new routes run through.
• Keep your optionality. The reason to diversify is to have choices under stress. Maintain the visibility and relationships that let you actually shift volume between origins when you need to.

The bottom line

The sourcing map that global trade ran on for twenty years is being redrawn in real time. Mexico has overtaken China as America's top supplier, China+1 has gone from buzzword to standard practice, and production is spreading across more countries than ever. It is a smart response to a riskier world, but it moves the challenge rather than removing it: a more diversified supply base is only as resilient as your ability to see across all of it. The companies that win the nearshoring era are the ones that diversify their sourcing and unify their visibility, so that no matter how many places their cargo comes from, they always know where every shipment is.