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Donald Trump’s trade war with China is starting to be felt across the US with port operators and air freight managers reporting a sharp decline in goods being transported from Asia.
The UK’s Financial Times reports that the first container shipments from China to face tariffs are due to land in the US this week. The Port of Los Angeles, the main route of entry for goods from China, expects scheduled arrivals in the week starting May 4 to be a third lower than last year.
US bookings for standard 20ft shipping containers from China were 45% lower than a year earlier by mid-April, according the the latest available data from tracking service Vizion.
The FT quotes Hapag-Lloyd, one of the world’s largest container shipping lines, as saying that customers had cancelled roughly 30% of its bookings out of China.
Hong Kong listed Taiwanese cintainer company TS Lines has suspended one of its Asia to US west coat services in recent weeks.
Almost 400,000 fewer containers are booked on Asia to North American routes during the four weeks from May 5 than planned – a 25% drop from the amount scheduled for the same period at the start of March before tariffs were imposed.
US industry association the Airforwarders Association said its members’ airfreight volumes from China has fallen by roughly 30%. “A lot of members have just stopped receiving orders from China,” said a spokesman.
The newspaper quoted Nathan Strang, ocean freight director at US logistics group Flexport as saying companies were waiting to ship goods in anticipation of Washington and Beijing agreeing a deal to mitigate levies.
LA port arrivals were up by 56% year-on-year last week – a sign that importers have been frontloading deliveries from other south-east Asian manufacturing hubs such as Cambodia and Vietnam that have a 90-day pause in tariffs.
John Denton, secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce said traders were ‘kicking decisions down the road’ as they waited to see how quickly the US and China could reach a deal.
