Everett CEO: Trump tariffs strain competition

EVERETT, Wash. - Businesses all over western Washington are trying to navigate tariffs. For some, it means raising prices for customers while others are trying to find ways to absorb the cost.

FOX 13 News talked with Gordon Bluechel, the CEO and Managing Director of Access Laser, in Everett, about the rising costs and the determined work to stay competitive.

What they're saying:

"Our products go into very expensive, you know, hundreds of millions of Euro-priced products, and we can't just change our suppliers. We have to go through a process to do that," he said. "Which means if any increases that we have, we have to absorb those or pass them on and in many cases, we have pricing that is fixed that we're not able to do that. So, that ends up just cutting into our profits."

He told us every time there is a change in tariffs, there are cascading effects which make it more difficult to do their specialized business all over the world.

"For us, 97% of all our business is overseas," Bluechel said. "We're the type of company the U.S. wants. We're contributing to our side of the trade and that just makes us less competitive to countries who have producers who are not facing these type of tariffs."

Stability and precision are part of the promise Bluechel makes to his worldwide customers as he and his team at Access Laser work to deliver their CO₂ molecular gas lasers on-time and at a competitive price.

"We're in the supply chain that supports all the AI chips, chips that are going into the latest cell phones, things like that, medical devices, breath — we have one of our customers that has a breath analysis system that will detect cancer," Bluechel said.

Backlash to Trump tariffs

By the numbers:

But he said it has become more difficult as they pay 10–15% or even higher tariffs for imports that must meet strict standards.

"Should we be looking to change suppliers? We have our largest suppliers up in Canada. One of our biggest suppliers comes out of China," he said.

Bluechel explained it can take years or even decades to build up new supply chains.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, American companies and consumers are carrying 90% of the cost of the tariffs.

The Supreme Court has also ruled President Donald Trump's tariffs violated federal law.

The president responded with a new global tariff which was reported as 10% as of Tuesday.

Local perspective:

For Bluechel, his 71 employees at Access Laser, and its customers, there's a domino effect if they must change vendors for their laser products which requires approval that could take months or longer.

"We have to basically, make sure that nothing that we're going to change will have any impact on the performance on the laser beam. We have very, very specialized lasers and there aren't a lot of companies in the world who can do what we do," he said.

In past tariff turmoil, he said some of their orders have been sent off to customers only to be rejected due to new tariffs by the time they arrived.

"Last year, we had, for us, a large order, $200,000, that got put on hold because the Chinese put the 145% tariff on top of the price going into China in retaliation for the 225% tariff that was on for things coming in," Bluechel said.

He said orders were accepted later when tariffs cooled.

"We basically were in a race to get it done before the potential for tariffs to go up again."

Bluechel said the company manufactures about 400 lasers a year. He said if tariffs continue to cause issues, his concern is losing the competitive edge on an international playing field.

"They keep going up and down. That makes it difficult for us to really kind of know as a business what we should be doing," Bluechel said.