“No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”

When the late Dr. Manmohan Singh borrowed Victor Hugo’s words in 1991, India was opening its economy to the world. Three decades later — well after Singh’s two-term tenure as India’s Prime Minister — the spirit of that moment faces a very different test: what happens when the world starts closing its doors to India?

This past week, US President Donald Trump announced an additional 25% ad valorem duty on Indian goods, effective later this month, lifting effective tariff rates for some items to around 50% once you strip out exemptions.

From an investor’s perspective, this isn’t just a geopolitical headline. The US is India’s single largest export market, $86.5 Bn in goods went that way in FY25, and the composition of those exports matters. Tariffs were once again the talk of the town.

Electronics, chemicals, textiles, pharma: all have high US shares. SBI Research estimates that in pharma alone, a tariff of this size could slice 5–10% off earnings for big exporters. Goldman Sachs puts the macro GDP drag at around 0.3 percentage points, small for the whole economy, but significant in concentrated pockets.

The “Direct Hit” Sectors

Two classic examples are home textiles and seafood. India’s home textile sector sends roughly 60% of its exports to the US. When tariffs lift landed costs for those goods, they lose price competitiveness in Walmart aisles and Amazon baskets overnight.

Seafood is smaller in market-cap terms but has a similar dynamic. Shrimp and frozen food majors like Apex Frozen Foods rely heavily on the US. A tariff this size, without offsetting incentives, will show up in quarterly numbers almost immediately.

As per SimranJeet Singh Bhatia, Senior Equity Research Analyst at Almondz Global, in the medium term these exporters will have to accelerate diversification to the UK and EU, where free trade agreements are already in place. That’s not just theory, textile players have been probing European buyers since FTA terms were announced.

“Unless you diversify into the European Union or UK, you........

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