MONTERREY, Mexico — Jorge Martínez, owner of a small Mexican company near the U.S. border, has seen how President Donald Trump’s threats of steep tariffs have upended markets, bent geopolitics and thrown businesses into uncertainty.

He’s thrilled about it.

As much of Mexico’s business world feared for the nightmare outcomes tariffs could cause, Martínez saw an opportunity.

“In a crisis, if you’re prepared, you win,” Martínez, 40, said as he sat in his office above the hum and clank of machines spitting out tiny plastic parts by the dozen. “Truth is, this whole thing benefited us.”

He is the CEO of Micro Partes, which has about 50 employees in the industrial city of Monterrey. They create a tiny universe of straps, plugs, fasteners, grommets, zip ties and clamps — objects that are critical to many production lines but that most people don’t give a second thought to, if they notice them at all. The products include a hollow ring to protect cables as they pass through walls, a lid to cover the heads of washing-machine screws and buttons to hold advertisements on shopping carts.

Martínez has long faced steep competition from China, where many of these parts are made cheaply.

But now that it’s no longer cheap to import them, his company is part of a trend: Businesses are searching high and low for local suppliers, mostly in northern Mexico, of the components they used to import. The search began before Trump took office, but it has intensified under his threats, benefiting businesses like Martínez’s.

When Trump announced tariffs this year, Mexican businesses that send most of their stock to the United States had to adapt to a new trade environment that punished anything not U.S.-made. Some companies took a wait-and-see approach. Others considered moving their manufacturing plants to the United States.

But in March, the Trump administration said tariffs would not apply to imports traded under a free-trade deal signed in his first term by the United States and its neighbors to the north and south. At that point, another option became available to manufacturers.

The trilateral U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement has specific, sometimes complicated, rules for products and industries. But, in general, to qualify for preferential treatment — and to dodge Trump’s tariffs — a product must be manufactured in the region, with at least some of its materials from there.

To prepare, Martínez acquired new machines and found new suppliers for the resin his company used to manufacture the plastic parts. He also stopped using Asia as a source of steel cubes — a key material his workers transform into molds, usually customized for the customer, that shape resin into a screw, a spark plug, a clip.

His company’s sales jumped by 32% in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2024. The increase has since slowed, but sales remain higher than last year’s.

“The North American bloc has to compete against the Red Dragon,” he said in a reference to China, known in his industry as the world’s factory. For now, he added, that might mean finding more suppliers like him in Mexico.

“And here we are,” he said, “ready, raising our hand.”