ZURICH. Swiss companies could receive as much as $2 billion in reimbursements for United States tariffs paid on exports between April 2025 and February 2026, economists at UBS said on Thursday. The estimate follows the Supreme Court decision striking down the tariff regime initially imposed by President Donald Trump, a ruling that reopened claims for duties collected under the invalidated framework.
The largest potential refunds, UBS said, relate to precision and medical instruments and to watches, the sectors that combine high unit values with the tariff exposure Swiss exporters felt most acutely during the dispute. Coffee, machinery and electrical equipment account for much of the remainder. The bank published the analysis as part of its quarterly assessment of Swiss trade and growth.
The headline number is not the number that will reach Swiss factory floors. UBS cautioned that refunds formally accrue to importers in the United States, not to the Swiss companies that shipped the goods. Exporters may recover part of the money through renegotiated contracts or commercial settlements, but many will discover that the legal right to a refund and the commercial right to keep it sit with different parties.
For the watch industry along the Jura arc, the distinction is familiar. Brands that invoice through American subsidiaries may see cash return inside the group. Smaller manufacturers that sold through independent distributors have less visibility and less leverage. Trade associations said they were asking member firms to audit invoices from the affected period before assuming any windfall.
The tariff episode sits inside a wider trade picture that remains unsettled. UBS expects headline United States duties on Switzerland eventually to settle at 15 per cent under the framework agreement both countries signed in November, up from the 12.5 per cent rate in force today. Effective levies are lower, currently around 6 per cent, because pharmaceuticals, Switzerland’s largest export category, remain largely exempt.
That exemption shapes the politics as much as the economics. Bern has spent two years arguing that medicines should not be collateral damage in a dispute about watches and steel, and Washington has largely accepted the case. Machinery makers and food exporters, less protected, view the refund discussion as partial compensation for a fight they did not choose.
The bank’s broader outlook mixed the trade relief with longer term caution. UBS analysts warned that China’s rising technological competitiveness poses a structural challenge to the Swiss industrial model, particularly in machinery and components where price and innovation now move together. A one off refund, they noted, does not answer a decade long shift in global supply chains.
Financial markets treated the estimate as secondary to the franc and the policy rate. The August inflation print and the National Bank’s September assessment remain the nearer drivers for exporters. Still, finance directors at listed industrial groups said they would model a partial refund as upside in third quarter guidance, with conservative assumptions on timing and collection rates.
The federal economics department said it was monitoring how Washington implements the reimbursement process and would support Swiss firms through trade promotion offices in New York and Chicago. No bilateral fund has been proposed; Bern’s role, officials said, is information and legal orientation, not substituting for commercial claims.
For households, the story is distant. For boardrooms in Basel, Biel and Schaffhausen, it is immediate: locate the invoices, identify the importer of record, and decide whether to chase money that may arrive years after the damage was booked. UBS put a number on the table. Turning that number into cash will be slower, and less evenly shared, than the headline suggests.