US President Donald Trump’s new tariff scheme is at the edge of the ocean shipping industry as it stops a trade war that is lucky for the demand for transport and scrambles to manage the decline to companies.
The Trump administration is set to announce the “mutual tariff” targeted nations on Wednesday, which have duties on American goods. The step will come after slapping the new import levy on the products of Mexico, China and Canada – the top American business partners as well as goods including steel and auto.
Major global container shipping firms such as MSC, Maersk, CMA CGM and Hapag-Loyd Transport, Walmart, Target and Home Depot piles of colored boxes with goods for American customers.
They are about $ 14 trillion veteran in the ocean shipping industry per year that handles about 80% of global trade. They are also dependent on companies that are being whipped by Trump’s growth, on-off tariffs.
Black Harden, vice -president of the International Trade of the Retail Industry Leaders Association, said, “The implementation of the stacked tariff has increased the increasing confusion.” “Companies do not have enough time, certainty and guidance, they need to include and comply these changes.”
Trump has applied the tariff during his second term in the office to add emergency powers to faster, and sometimes to retreat and restore.
John S. Kit Johnson, director of import compliance at James Company, said, “The importers do not know from a week to next what their duty cost is going to be.”
Johnson has seen customers selecting high -cost air shipping for auto and other items that normally travel from the sea, in the bid to walk in front of the new tariff.
To avoid Trump’s tariff, US container imports have also reached a record level in recent months as companies participate in toys, furniture, beds, machinery and parts from China, the world’s number 1 exporter.
As the danger expanded, other vessel types and airplanes have been called to help Europe and Far East, Far East, Paneer and Drugs from Wine and Ireland.
According to data from the freight pricing pricing platform XENETA, the average on-demand spot rate to ship a 40-foot container for America’s West Coast Route on Tuesday was $ 2,844 on Tuesday, a day’s advantage of about 16%. This rate is still lower than a year ago, when the risk of fierce attacks on the Red Sea Shipping Lane was a new phenomenon and did not deform by importers to avoid trading tariffs.
Tariffs bite
But the knee shocks of the companies, the front-loading strategy is just a temporary fix-especially the anti-counterpart stoke stoke business wars that could suffocate demand.
Tariffs come as tifs as ocean shipping faces a more possible crisis than a separate Trump scheme to impose heavy American port call charges on ships with a link to Ocean.
The enemies of the proposal say that it could reduce domestic agriculture and energy exporters that Trump promised to support. They also warns that it can rule the ports on the epidemic-level chaos, making the ship operators hungry to avoid fees to avoid some ports with cargo while keeping others hungry.
At the top of the tariff, the layering has decided about how to source the goods, sell and transfer.
Zeneta’s chief analyst Peter Sand said, “When you keep changing the rules of the game, you cannot take important decisions on your supply chain.”
A Greek container shipping executive, who requested oblivion due to the fear that public comments could negatively affect the business, said that customers were not loading cargo from fear that a large levy could be imposed at the end of a long ocean trip.
“We are in a waiting-and-looking mode.”
Experts have started counting losses from Trump’s tariff.
According to the responses of the Institute for Supply Management Survey, Levi has already helped derail a change in the US manufacturing sector, which depends on imports and exports and enhances significant demand for transportation.
S&P Global Market Intelligence hopes that the US Ocean container freight imports will fall 0.7% in 2025.
“While there is still a strong growth in the first quarter, it is expected to be reversed as a tariff bite in the second quarter of 2025,” S&P said.
Meanwhile, the US customs and border security are scratched for riprograms and testing systems required to calculate and collect new tariffs. In February, the Trump administration delayed plans to collect duties on direct sale of low-value goods from retail vendors such as Temu and Shin after a pile of packages at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
Customs broker Johnson said, “The more of these tariffs we have, the difficulty for everyone that he is going to maintain everyone.”
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)
