News / Globalisation still in play, despite US bid for new world trade order

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DHL remains bullish on its claim that globalisation remains firmly in play, even amid the fallout from US efforts to rewrite the global trade order.

Addressing an event launching its 2025 Global Connectedness Index, DHL Express CEO John Pearson said the company’s optimism had been questioned earlier this year when it released its Global Trade Atlas in Mexico.

“We released it just a few days before ‘liberation day’, which was of course significantly linked to Mexico, but global trade is a long-term plan and every piece of data we’ve seen illustrates how very resilient it continues to be,” he said.

“That positivity is apparent in the trajectory too. Trade is like water, it will always find its way to the sea. It may find a different path, it may start and end in different origins, but the flow of trade is rather consistent. One country may be retreating, the others aren’t.”

Pointing to the data points produced by the Global Connectedness Index, Mr Pearson noted that, excluding the pandemic period, over the first half of 2025 global trade had grown at its fastest rate for 15 years.

Using 20 million data points from 25 sources, the index suggests trade in goods grew some 6% on last year, driven largely by US imports and Chinese exports, with sub-Saharan Africa experiencing the quickest growth rate, of 9.7%.

Author of the report Steven Altman, from New York University Stern School of Business, said: “One of the drivers of that growth in early 2025 was a surge of imports into the US as buyers rushed to get goods into the country in advance of tariff increases.

“But that surge peaked in March, and global trade remained well above last year’s, even in June, when US import volumes dipped below last year’s level. So, US imports were an important part of the story – but not the only part of the story.”

Much of the growth seems to have been led by China amending its trade practices to offset the impact of tariffs: while its exports to the US fell $51bn, or 15%, over the eight months to September, those to Asean increased $55bn, 15%.

Similarly, China pushed up its exports to Africa by $28bn, a 25% increase year on year, and to Europe by some 8%, to $26bn – Mr Altman describing these surges in non-US exports as “remarkable”.

“But the fastest growth wasn’t in China, and it wasn’t in the US. If we look at trade value growth by region, the fastest was in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Mr Altman.

“The biggest contributors to that were Ghana, Zambia, Ivory Coast, and DRC. The biggest factor was the increase in the value of non-energy commodity exports, both in value and volume terms.”