Loadstar Leader: all change – and plus ca change at TPM26

ID 184029598 © VectorMine | Dreamstime.com

The looming application of fees by US administrators on Chinese-built vessels calling at US ports was the first topic of conversation at the 2025 iteration of the shipping industry’s largest annual conference, TPM.

The proposed USTR 301 port fee was the first thing MSC chief executive Soren Toft addressed in his keynote Q&A with the Journal of Commerce.

As the fee introduction date hoved into view, China responded in predictable fashion, placing reciprocal fees on US operators, and although onerous to US operators such as Matson, it was never going to have the same widespread impact as its US equivalent.

The decision to move the USTR 301 fees into abeyance until November was a huge relief to a wide range of industry stakeholders – not just the carriers and their balance sheets, but shippers and forwarders whose supply chains would have inevitably been disrupted as carriers reorganised their networks.

As the industry gets ready to head to Long Beach for TPM26, even more damaging US-imposed fees are now being proposed under the White House’s recently released Maritime Action Plan (The Loadstar’s explainer can be found here).

Whereas USTR 301 was chiefly about addressing China’s “maritime dominance” through state subsidies, MAP’s main goal is to “rebuild US shipbuilding and reduce dependence on foreign-built and foreign-flagged vessels“, and implement port fees on every non-US ship, regardless of where it was built or who operates it: a levy of between $0.01 and $0.235 per kg unloaded at US ports.

Under the 301 USTR proposals, carriers had a certain amount of wriggle-room to juggle vessel deployment and ensure US-bound vessels had been built in South Korea, Japan, or Europe and thus trim the extra costs as much as possible.

The MAP proposals appear to have shut off these circumventions, and the result, as everyone in the shipping business knows, is the extra costs will be fully passed on to US consumers.

They could find themselves be on the hook for a massive bill – at $25 per tonne, the US government estimates it could raise $1.5trn over a 10-year period.

That seems an excessive price to pay for, what in effect is, decades of strategic neglect by those consumers’ own government.

So much seems to have happened over the past 12 months, good and bad, and yet, on this issue at least, we seem to be in almost exactly the same place, bar the fact that proposals seem more ridiculous than ever.

It is probably remembering Mr Toft’s concluding remarks from last year: “The liner shipping companies all have ships built in China; we all have ships on order in China; and I really hope that, if this does come through, it will at least be forward-looking and not penalise us for mistakes made in the past, when we didn’t even realise they were mistakes.”