Chinese solar companies reroute supply chains through Africa and Southeast Asia to dodge US tariffs

If you wanted to design the most geographically absurd supply chain imaginable, it might look something like this: Chinese polysilicon gets turned into wafers, shipped to a cell factory in Kenya, processed there, sent to an assembler in Indonesia, and then exported to the United States as a “non-Chinese” solar panel. The whole journey spans roughly 20,000 miles. The goal is not efficiency. It’s tariff avoidance. Chinese solar manufacturers have been perfecting this kind of geographic arbitrage for over a decade, and the latest iteration, routing production through East African nations, has already generated over $100 million per month in US-bound shipments within months of emerging. The US government is trying to close the loopholes, but the pattern is starting to feel like a very expensive game of whack-a-mole. The long road from tariffs to workarounds The roots of this trade dynamic stretch back to 2012, when the US first imposed anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Chinese solar imports. The idea was straightforward: protect domestic manufacturers from being undercut by Chinese competitors selling panels below production cost. What happened next was predictable in hindsight...