For a decade the sourcing pitch for Vietnam was a single word: cheaper. That word did most of the selling, and it made buyers lazy about the one thing that now decides landed cost — where a product is genuinely from. In 2025 the United States and Vietnam signed a framework that turned origin from a compliance footnote into the biggest line on the customs entry. This is the issue where we do the arithmetic.

What the framework says

In October 2025 the two governments announced the Framework for an Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade. Two numbers matter to anyone importing building materials.

The first is 20% — a reciprocal tariff applied to Vietnamese-origin goods entering the US. It is broad: it reaches foundational construction materials such as aggregates and gypsum wallboard, and it doubled the rate on cement to 20%.

The second is 40% — the rate applied to goods the US judges to have been transshipped, that is, made substantially elsewhere (read: China) and merely routed through a Vietnamese port with a new label. The framework prices that fiction at exactly double the honest rate.

Read those two numbers together and the message is unambiguous. The 20-point gap between them is not a tax on your tile or your plywood. It is a tax on your paperwork. A container of genuinely Vietnamese-made board that can prove it clears at 20%. The identical container that cannot — or that quietly began life in Foshan — clears at 40%, if it clears at all.

The 20% still lands below the alternative

Twenty percent is not nothing, and no one at this desk will pretend it is. But a tariff is only meaningful next to its alternative, and the alternative for most of these goods is Chinese origin — where the stack is heavier.

A container of building materials from China typically carries Section 301 at 25%, and then, for the categories that matter most to our buyers, antidumping and countervailing duties on top: often 40% on ceramic tile, higher on quartz surfaces, and into the triple digits on hardwood plywood and aluminium extrusion. The Vietnamese-origin line, at a flat 20%, usually still lands under the Chinese one once those layers are counted — which is the same logic that moved these supply chains in the first place, only now with a sharper pencil. Our earlier tariff comparison across the six groups walks that stack layer by layer; the framework doesn't overturn it, it raises the Vietnamese floor from near-zero to 20% while leaving the Chinese ceiling where it was.

The market has already voted. Despite the new tariff, Vietnam's exports to the US rose 28% in 2025, from $119.6 billion to $153.2 billion. A 20% line reprices a trade. It does not end one.

Read the HS code, not the headline

The single most expensive mistake here is treating "20%" as the whole story. It is the reciprocal baseline, and several of our material groups sit partly or wholly outside it:

  • Steel and aluminium are governed by a separate Section 232 regime, not the reciprocal rate — structural steel and finished aluminium parts are priced under their own schedule, and small exporters feel it hardest.
  • Steel rebar carries its own antidumping/countervailing exposure, with duties assessed as high as roughly 115%.
  • Decorative and hardwood plywood remain under active US trade-remedy scrutiny — a live investigation, not a settled rate.

The practical rule for a buyer has not changed, only hardened: the number that lands your BOM is the one attached to your six-digit HS code on the day the container clears, not the figure in the headline. A proposal that quotes you a single blended tariff across a mixed BOM is guessing. Ours prices each line to its own code, and flags the ones sitting in a moving regime.

Why origin is now the entire job

Return to the 20-vs-40 gap, because it reframes what a sourcing desk is actually for. When the penalty for unprovable origin is a doubling of the tariff, the certificate of origin stops being a document you collect at the end and becomes the product you are buying. The factory has to be real. The value added in Vietnam has to be genuine and documented. The paper trail — mill certificates, production records, the certificate-of-origin scheme your duty rate depends on — has to survive a US Customs officer who is now specifically looking for the 40% case.

That is the work behind the 20% line, and it is the work we do before a single container is booked. It is also the subject of our next issue, Origin Is the Product, which goes inside the paperwork that keeps a Vietnamese shipment on the right side of the number.

Sources & data notes

Framework terms are drawn from the October 2025 Joint Statement on the United States–Vietnam Framework for an Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade and contemporaneous trade-policy analysis; construction- material coverage (aggregates, gypsum, cement, rebar, plywood, steel and aluminium) and the 28% / $153.2 billion 2025 export figure are from 2025–2026 reporting. Chinese-origin duty layers (Section 301, AD/CVD) are indicative ranges from published US trade-remedy orders. Tariff rates, scope and active investigations change — sometimes weekly. These figures are for orientation only; confirm the current rate against your specific HS code and entry date before any commercial decision. This is not legal or customs advice.

Sourcing across several material groups, into the US? That is exactly the BOM the 20% line was written for. Send us one BOM and we return a single, duty-aware proposal — each line priced to its own HS code, each origin document accounted for — within 48 hours. Our own fiber-cement line, DURAGREEN®, ships under the same origin discipline.