Trade news gets bundled, and I think that's the mistake this page is for. Tariffs, sanctions and export rules land in one sentence, and the screen shows one row, even though the mechanisms differ. A tariff is a tax on goods that are still allowed to move. An export control decides that some goods may not move, or may move only with a license, to a named place or end user. A sanction can freeze assets or cut off transactions with no container involved.
The keyword screen treats the words as different shocks, which is how I built the lists, because a ban and a tax kept getting the same badge. "Tariff" is on the TRADE/TARIFF list. "Export controls" is on the CHIP/EXPORT list. "Sanction" marks a story as political and is on neither list, so a pure sanctions headline can get no shock name.
What a tariff does to the accounts
A tariff makes a shipment more expensive while leaving it legal, or it raises the price a buyer pays if the other country retaliates. Companies then absorb it, pass it on, or reroute the factory, and the bill can be sized. Caterpillar's FY2025 filing expects about $2.6 billion of tariff cost in 2026. Procter & Gamble said tariffs, net of recoveries, cost 30 basis points of gross margin in fiscal 2026. Walmart said incremental import tariffs raised merchandise costs in fiscal 2026.
Tariffs also get paused, reversed, and litigated, so one policy can be repriced several times before the factory has moved. Nike's fiscal 2026 filing records a $986 million cost-of-sales benefit for expected refunds after the US Supreme Court held that tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were unauthorized. Note the refund is still about tariffs. It changes what Nike pays, not what it's allowed to ship.
Inventory and contracts set the lag. Goods already in a warehouse were bought at the old duty, and a long supply contract may fix the price through the next season, so the margin hit arrives when the next purchase order clears customs, not on the afternoon of the announcement. The sector map in which sectors react to which shocks describes who usually sits on which side of that tax. It doesn't describe a ban.
What an export control does instead
An export control can stop a shipment from leaving at all, which is a much bigger deal than a higher duty, and it does that by naming a product, a performance level, and a destination or end user. The practical question is whether a license will be granted. No license, no sale. It doesn't shrink by 10%, it goes to zero, and inventory bought for that order can be written down. A later license can bring part of the revenue back, which is why the same rule can produce a charge and a reversal inside one year.
AMD's fiscal 2025 filing is a direct case. In April 2025 a new US license requirement covered the Instinct MI308 for China and a group of other countries. AMD took about $800 million of inventory charges in the second quarter and reversed about $360 million in the fourth after some licenses arrived. China including Hong Kong was 22% of billed sales, and later sales of that product depend on licenses. The AMD page has the figures.
Nvidia's fiscal 2026 filing is the same mechanism at a larger size. An April 2025 license requirement on the H20 led to a $4.5 billion charge, and licensed H20 sales later came to about $60 million. A February 2026 license for small amounts of the H200 requires inspection in the United States, and the filing says those chips then face a 25% US import tariff, which is the rare case of a license and a tariff on the same shipment. The filing also says Nvidia was effectively foreclosed from China's data center compute market at year end. See Nvidia.
Qualcomm shows the end-user version. Product sales to Huawei ended after the US revoked Qualcomm's export license in May 2024. The license then expired, and the licensing segment stopped booking Huawei royalties in the second quarter of fiscal 2025. A tariff on phones would have left a royalty on a legal sale. The revocation removed the sale. See Qualcomm.
Billing location versus the end user
Export rules care about where the product goes and who uses it, while revenue footnotes often care about where the invoice is sent. Those are different maps, and this is where most people read the wrong column.
- AMD says billing location is where the customer is invoiced, which isn't necessarily where the chip ends up, so a license rule aimed at a destination can hit revenue that the geographic table books somewhere else.
- Texas Instruments reports 21% of revenue from China-headquartered end customers, and about 50% of revenue from products shipped into China. A rule on shipments and a rule on customers won't hit the same half of the business. See Texas Instruments.
- Broadcom's delivery figures show where distributors and contract manufacturers take delivery, and the filing says end customers are often somewhere else. China including Hong Kong was 17% of fiscal 2025 revenue on that delivery basis. See Broadcom.
- Intel says a significant portion of revenue comes from Intel 7 products made at its fab in Israel, which isn't insured against war or political violence, and that a disruption in Taiwan would cut off tiles it now buys from TSMC. The control can bind the factory, not only the customer. See Intel.
If you only read the country share in the revenue table, you'll miss the shipment share and the factory share. The stock page prints both when the filing gives them, so use the one that matches the rule in the headline.
Sanctions that never touch a container
Banks and card networks meet sanctions as a rule about who they may serve. Visa's FY2025 filing says sanctions and trade tensions have pushed governments toward domestic payment systems, and there is no duty rate in that sentence, because the risk is volume leaving the network. Mastercard's filing says the same thing: sanctions and adverse trade policies are reasons a jurisdiction may favor a local switch.
Linde is an industrial case that still isn't a tariff. Linde Engineering's contracts in Russia were suspended in May 2022 under sanctions, and RusChemAlliance kept pursuing claims in Russian courts. Linde says it doesn't expect a material earnings impact given $1.9 billion of liabilities recorded at December 31, 2025. The cash effect is a reserved legal exposure and a stopped contract, not a higher input price. See Linde.
A keyword screen handles a mixed headline by keeping the first hit. If the story says "export controls," the chip label wins and a payments or engineering angle drops off the badge. If it says "tariff," the trade label wins and the license angle drops. The reading method is in how to read a scored headline.
A short test when the headline is mixed
When the headline mixes the words, I run a short test and then stop. If it's about cost, it's a tariff. If it's about permission, it's a control. Ask whether the government is taxing a shipment that is still legal, or deciding whether the shipment is legal, and whether the rule names a product and an end user or a country and a duty rate, because end user rules don't scale with the revenue footnote for that country. Look for a license that has already been granted or pulled, which shows up as inventory charges and reversals rather than a margin comment, and separate the factory from the invoice, since Taiwan, Israel, and a China billing hub are three different facts. If you own a bank or a payment network, ask whether the story is about dollar clearing or domestic rails, which won't show up as a goods tariff. If the badge says only one of the words in a mixed headline, read the other word yourself, because the matcher keeps the first hit.
Shipping lanes are a third mechanism, physical rather than legal. A closed strait raises freight and can strand cargo that is otherwise legal and duty-paid, and that sequence is covered in shipping chokepoints and what they do to equities. Don't file it under sanctions just because the cause was political.
None of these tests says whether a rule will be tightened or relaxed. They say which line of the business the current rule can reach, and which label on the screen is likely to hide the other line.
Educational description of tariffs, export controls and sanctions. Not investment advice. Rules, license practice and company exposures change. Check the filing named on the stock page.