Equispheres CEO Kevin Nicholds is nervously wondering what the future will hold after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Sunday applying 25 per cent tariffs to most Canadian goods, including his company’s high-tech powder, starting Tuesday.
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For the past decade, Equispheres has been painstakingly building a customer base that includes some of the world’s biggest automotive and aerospace companies.
The Kanata-based firm manufactures a unique metal powder used in additive manufacturing – essentially, industrial-strength 3D printing for commercial aircraft and automobiles rather than plastic figurines. Made from aluminum alloys, the powder is perfectly uniform and spherical, the company says, making it the ideal ingredient for lightweight but sturdy metal objects.
Backed by $70 million in venture capital, Equispheres has been in rapid expansion mode after signing some big contracts with blue-chip customers in the United States. It recently invested in the range of $10 million in new, cutting-edge reactors that quadrupled its production capacity.
But now, Equispheres CEO Kevin Nicholds is nervously wondering what the future will hold after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to apply 25 per cent tariffs to most Canadian goods, including his company’s high-tech powder.
“The timing is terrible in that we want to support our U.S. customers,” Nicholds said in an interview with OBJ on Monday afternoon.
Equispheres, which employs about 70 people, exports all of its products, with 90 per cent of its revenues coming from the U.S.
Nicholds said any volatility in the market is never a good thing for a business like his. And even though Trump gave Canada a one-month reprieve from tariffs on Monday, Nicholds says just the threat of such measures has a chilling effect on customers.
“Whether there is a 25 per cent tariff or not, this is another tearing up of an agreement that Trump put together himself just five years ago,” he said, referring to the free trade agreement among Canada, the United States and Mexico that was ratified in 2020. “Companies like us are investing ideally in an envelope of some certainty around those markets.
“We’ve spent 10 years getting ourselves in a position to where we are today. A lot goes into getting to this stage. This adds a lot of unwelcome uncertainty.”
Nicholds says Equispheres started feeling the impact of Trump’s tariff threats as far back as November, when a “significant” potential investor from the U.S. decided to hold off on writing a cheque.
“When the talk of the tariffs came out, there was enough uncertainty that they just put it on pause,” he said. “People don’t like to invest in an uncertain climate.”
But Ottawa companies that rely on U.S. sales aren’t the only ones feeling the pain of the looming trade war.
