US shippers slam USTR port fee plan – 'an apocalypse for trade'
The Trump administration’s plan to revive US shipbuilding by levying hefty fees on China-built or ...
Soren Toft. Photo: caughtinthemoment.com
The transatlantic container trade could be the most severely impacted if the US goes ahead with the proposed imposition of US fees on Chinese-built ships, MSC CEO Soren Toft said this week.
Speaking at the S&P Global TPM conference in Long Beach, Mr Toft said the impact of the plan, by the US Trade Representative’s 301 action, possibly amounting to $1m per call at each US port by each ship built in China, irrespective of the nationality of the operator, would ...
Comment on this article
lincoln lin
March 05, 2025 at 1:01 amThis is really terrible.
Dwight Campbell
March 06, 2025 at 9:23 pmI marvel how this is all going to be paid for by US consumers.
At a time when they want to twist everybody’s arms to buy overpriced and probably reduced quality ships, they also tariff steel and aluminum imports. The current 6x price of American built box ships is only going higher. They are years away from turning this into reality, and Trump’s term is up in Nov. 2028. Not much is going to change before Trump is done. I think the US consumers by then will vote to chuck this as far away as possible, because they will be paying for it in the increased costs of almost everything.
This organization is calling buying Chinese ships a “mistake”. Even 4 full years of this looks like it would cost 80 billion dollars that would demand to be paid by US consumers, as it should be.
Once again, the US is expecting everyone else to chip in to subsidize their over priced products. I may be on the wrong end of this affair by stating some of the obvious things, but we need to start evaluating this stuff pragmatically.
Even the WSJ sums this up with:
“The U.S. shipyards aren’t competitive with foreign rivals in terms of the size of ships they produce, how long they take to build or how much they cost. ”
Credit: WSJ article: “In Shipbuilding, the U.S. Is Tiny and Rusty”, March 2, 2025