The 10-Point Gap and the Threat to the Nearshoring Boom

There is a number that belongs on the agenda of every board of directors in Mexico, and it is not the exchange rate or this week's tariff. It is a subtraction.

The United States just reported that its business logistics costs fell to 7.8% of GDP, nearly a full point lower than the year before. In Mexico, moving a product still costs between 12% and 18% of its value. That 10-point gap is, at once, our greatest competitive weakness and the largest value-creation opportunity of the coming decade. While the public debate obsesses over how many factories arrive, the real game is played over how much it costs to move what those factories produce.

And this week, the data tells an uncomfortable story.

Disruption Stopped Being News

The "State of Logistics Report" — the most widely read annual publication in our industry — was titled "Forged in Disruption" this year, and the choice of name is no accident. The thesis: disruption is no longer the event that interrupts planning; it is the assumption upon which planning is built. Those still waiting for things to "get back to normal" are waiting for a world that no longer exists.

On July 1, the United States chose not to extend the USMCA in its current form. The agreement remains in force, but we have entered a regime of annual reviews through 2036: permanent trade negotiations instead of long-term certainty, for a country that exported more than US$534 billion to its neighbor last year and became its top supplier, ahead of Canada and China. The next round is the week of July 20. Rating agencies have already trimmed growth projections, citing regulatory volatility.

The sector's thermometer confirms the anxiety: the transportation and logistics confidence index dropped nearly eight points in the first quarter, heavy-vehicle retail sales are down almost 20% through the first half, and the national trucking fleet now averages more than 19 years of age after operating costs jumped 20% last year. Translation: carriers are postponing investment at the precise moment structural demand requires it.

The Paradox Nobody Is Reading

Here is the counterintuitive part. While confidence collapses, the physical indicators keep advancing. Mexican ports moved more than 4 million containers through May, up 4.4%. Cross-border trade topped US$84 billion in March alone. The country's freight and logistics market is on track to grow by more than 5% this year, approaching US$131 billion.

Demand is not the problem. The problem is that we are serving that demand with a cost structure that — proportionally — doubles that of our main trading partner, on infrastructure that no international ranking places among the world's top sixty, and with industrial parks where power supply has become the number one business complaint: in the northeast, the business chambers themselves report that nine out of ten companies struggle to secure it.

Growing like this is possible. Growing like this profitably is not.

Three Bets to Close the Gap

The executive question is not whether Mexico can capture the additional US$35 to US$0 billion in manufacturing investment the studies project for the next decade. It is whether Mexico can do it while making money. Three bets define the answer.

Shared logistics as national efficiency. The fact that 95% of companies already outsource part of their foreign-trade operation tells us the market has understood something industrial policy has yet to articulate: with logistics costs at 12–18%, duplicating infrastructure — every company with its own warehouse, its own fleet, its own trade-compliance team — is capital destruction. Consolidating volumes with specialized operators is the fastest route to cost compression that does not depend on the government building anything at all.

AI applied, not announced. For the first time, the industry's flagship report dedicated a full section to artificial intelligence, and its finding is uncomfortable: the divide is no longer between companies that have AI and those that don't, but between those that have embedded it into core workflows and those accumulating pilots that never scale. And the barrier to entry is not the software: it is having clean, complete, consistent data from your own operation. That costs no capital; it costs discipline. Which is exactly why so few have it.

Negotiate with the USMCA clock, not against it. Annual reviews turn certainty into an asset each company must build internally: impeccable origin traceability, deep regional supplier networks, and redundancy designed into the logistics footprint. The company that documents the regional content of every component today fears neither the July round nor the 2027 one. The company that doesn't is living on borrowed time.

My Final Opinion

The United States cut its logistics costs by nearly a point of GDP in a single year, operating in the same disruptive world we do. It wasn't luck, and it wasn't geography: it was productivity — consolidation, applied technology, and a market that punishes inefficiency without mercy.

Mexico has already won the first half of the match: it has the demand, the position, and the attention of global capital. The second half is played on the ten points of the gap. Every point we close is billions of dollars that stop evaporating into transit times, waiting lines, and inefficiency — and start converting into margin, wages, and investment.

Nearshoring brought us the cargo. Let history remember us as the country that learned to move it better than anyone.