A ship carrying 80,000 medical vibrators docked in Los Angeles this January as part of a six-month plan to prevent Trump’s tariffs from stopping one small British company’s efforts to improve the American public’s sexual wellness.
Guildford-based MV Health, and its more consumer-facing wing MysteryVibe, started preparing for the tariffs last June, raising £1.5 million in cash from its investors and ordering a year’s worth of vibrators and other intimate health devices from its manufacturer in China.
Soum Rakshit, the £9 million-turnover company’s founder and chief executive, credited his investors’ foresight for the decision to plan for tariffs: “From a very apolitical perspective, they said there is a high possibility that there would be a change in government. And one of the things that Trump has been clear about, and did in his first term, is to add tariffs on China.”
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The majority of MV Health’s revenues come from the US market. Its devices are used by 200,000 men and women to treat conditions such as pelvic pain, arousal disorder, erectile dysfunction, period pain, mastitis, prostatitis and delayed ejaculation. The company designs its products in the UK, with the manufacturing done in China.
The company normally only orders three month’s worth of products, given the demands such orders place on cashflow. Rakshit said the move was “massively” risky if Trump had not gone ahead with his threat of placing tariffs on China. “We would have had one year’s worth of cash stuck, which is a complete waste of money,” he said.
However, he saw the alternative of sky-high tariffs as even riskier. Speaking before Trump had hit China with tariffs of 145 per cent for some products, he said: “If I put it on a ship, which takes two months, by the time it reaches the US tariffs might be 100 per cent and they won’t release the goods till you pay 100 per cent,” he said.
Six devices from MV Health currently have approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and are fully reimbursed for US military veterans by the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
To meet requirements of US military hospitals for medical devices to be produced in the US, MV Health was already planning to begin manufacturing there, and it has now accelerated those plans. The shipment into Los Angeles and its existing stocks will meet demand up to December, at which point MV hopes to have lined up a US manufacturer.
Rakshit said: “It doesn’t solve tariffs but it gives us enough time to set up US manufacturing. Which is really the only solution.” MV Health plans to continue to use Chinese manufacturing to supply to the rest of the world.
He is not alone in having to think through the impact of rocketing tariffs. Some are seeing a silver lining. James Griffith, co-founder and chief executive of the £28 million-turnover tech accessories company Mous, said businesses that under-trade with America, having focused their efforts on the rest of the world, were now at an advantage when competing with US rivals.
“Being a British business, our biggest market is UK, Europe and the rest of the world and our biggest competitors are American companies, so it is actually giving us a bit of an advantage,” Griffiths said. “And we are having our suppliers see competitors cancel orders, and so we are increasing our orders and getting lower cost of goods. As our competitors are in a world of pain, we are accelerating.” He said discounts of 20 per cent were on offer.
Reacting to change on the fly
Hidden in the heart of the Weald of Kent is a small family-owned business that plays a vital role in the world’s multibillion-dollar semiconductor industry (Richard Tyler writes).
Magnetic Shields, which was founded in 1957, boasts as its biggest customer the Dutch firm ASML, whose extreme ultraviolet lithography machines produce the patterns on silicon that enable the manufacture of high-performance computer chips. Magnetic Shields is the only supplier to ASML of shielding for its two-nanometer machine, which helps the likes of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company make its most cutting-edge chips, which end up in Apple devices and Nvidia graphic processors.
The company’s managing director David Woolger says the applications for its shields have shifted since the Second World War, from shielding radar to hard disk drives and monitors for IBM in the 1970s. Trump’s tariffs are just the latest change, he says: “Through our history we have got used to these big cycles of change. It has made us agile and careful to be aware of what is going on, so we can adjust quickly.”
Magnetic now also supplies the medical, defence and space industries. Nasa is a customer and included its shields on the solar orbiter that was flown into the sun to collect data, while others have ended up on missions to Mars. “We have a very global supply chain and a global customer base,” said Woolger, with about 20 per cent of the company’s £12.5 million in sales coming from the US.
The majority of the raw material for Magnetic’s shielding products is produced by mills in France and Germany. Its two main US competitors for shielding also buy their raw materials from those same European suppliers. So at one point last week Magnetic Shields looked set to benefit from Trump’s tariffs. While it had to pay 10 per cent duty to import its shields into the US, those American competitors faced a 20 per cent tariff fee on the raw materials they import from France and Germany. Magnetic Shields doesn’t face any tariff to buy what it needs from Europe.
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Then on Wednesday Trump paused the reciprocal tariffs policy for 90 days on all countries aside from China, lowering the tariff on goods from the European Union to 10 per cent, and eliminating the difference with the UK and potentially Magnetic Shields’ advantage.
But Trump’s pause did not include the 25 per cent tariffs already imposed on some goods from Canada and Mexico. The uncertainty that the tariffs have created has already led to Magnetic Shields receiving inquiries from potential Canadian customers looking to move orders away from America. “We had a new customer we signed up yesterday from Canada,” said Woogler, 44. “We are already starting to see some potential benefits as a result of this,” he added, although he is mindful that his major customers, such as ASML, will be negatively affected.
Always thinking ahead, Woolger has also just set up a Florida-based company: Magnetic Shields USA Corporation. “We have done this to enable us to react to continued changes and potentially grow a US-based business if needed,” he said.
