BENTON HARBOR, MI — On Friday’s first-quarter earnings call, Midstate Appliance Holdings CEO Greg Halverson assured Wall Street analysts that the latest round of tariffs on Chinese-sourced compressors, motor housings, and “basically the dishwasher” would be “fully margin-neutral over the long term,” which he later defined under direct questioning as “the back half of 2031, give or take, which I believe is also coincidentally when I retire.”
The hour-long call featured fourteen separate uses of the verb “absorb,” a word Halverson clarified meant “raising the suggested retail price on every SKU by between four and eleven percent and trusting the American consumer to absorb it on our behalf.” He added that the pricing team had been “absorbing aggressively” since March.
“What’s exciting here is the optionality,” said Marcus Devereux, lead consumer-durables analyst at Crestmark Equity Research, in a same-day note. “Management has identified at least three separate retirements between now and the long term, any one of which could fully resolve the tariff exposure.” Devereux maintained his Buy rating and lifted his price target by one dollar.
Halverson also introduced a new non-GAAP metric on slide 14, “Tariff-Adjusted Underlying Operational EBITDA Excluding Tariffs,” which he described as “EBITDA, but with the tariffs taken back out, because at the end of the day those don’t reflect the underlying business.” The accompanying footnote read, in six-point type, “Forward-looking; assumes tariffs do not exist.”
When one analyst gently asked whether the company had considered relocating production stateside, Halverson responded that Midstate had “looked closely at a number of domestic alternatives” before concluding that the United States “does not currently manufacture the parts of a refrigerator.” A follow-up question about which parts, specifically, was deferred to the investor relations team and never resurfaced.
Reached for comment, a lineworker at the company’s Benton Harbor facility — which assembles imported components into finished units stamped “Crafted in America” — said he had not been invited to the call but had noticed that the cafeteria recently switched from Coke products to “an off-brand cola sourced from somewhere none of us recognize.” He declined to speculate on the long term.
By the closing bell, MIDA was up 3.2%, with several analysts citing Halverson’s “disciplined long-term framing” and the reassuring fact that, per his own definition, none of it will technically be his problem.