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Importers and exporters breathe sighs of relief President Trump's April 10 delay of his expansive new tariff regime and exhaled even more this week when the U.S. and China paused tit-for-tat increases for 90 days. But as NPR international affairs correspondent Jackie Northam reports, the shippers who have to have boats in ports to move goods around the world are still holding their breath.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: Container shipping companies have been on a roller coaster ride since April 2. That's when President Trump announced his, quote, "liberation day" and imposed tariffs on virtually every country in the world. What followed was a series of shifting, seemingly erratic moves in Trump's tariff policy.
CHARLES VAN DER STEENE: In the short term, what tariffs have done is create this profound uncertainty, where a tariff was introduced, then paused, then changed, reintroduced.
NORTHAM: That's Charles van der Steene, president for North American Operations at Maersk, the world's second-largest shipping company. He says Trump's whipsawing tariff policy has sowed confusion for American businesses, especially those importing goods from China, where until recently, Trump imposed 145% tariffs.
VAN DER STEENE: Large U.S. shippers just didn't know when to ship their goods, how much of their goods they would ship, and how much it would then cost them by the time they would arrive, which has led to a reduction of supply, simply because everyone decided to wait and see.
NORTHAM: And that impacted shipping companies on the Asia to U.S. route, says Alan Murphy, the CEO of Sea-Intelligence, a container shipping research firm.
ALAN MURPHY: Bookings dropped somewhere between 30 and 50% out of China.
NORTHAM: Murphy says if there isn't enough cargo to cover the costs, shipping companies have to adapt. For example, they could slow the vessels down to try and save money.
MURPHY: We have seen an increase in what we call blank sailings - canceled sailings. In most cases, the vessels are, so to speak, parked in Asia.
NORTHAM: Some shipping companies refuse to cancel ships because they want to maintain reliability. Nils Haupt is head of corporate communications for Hapag-Lloyd AG, the biggest container shipping line in Germany.
NILS HAUPT: We will still have weekly departures as promised to our customers, but what we are doing is we use smaller vessels.
NORTHAM: The container shipping industry generally thinks in terms of quarterlies, rather than weeks or months, when planning schedules, routes and logistics. But recent events such as airstrikes on ships by Houthi militants in the Red Sea, the war in Ukraine, and certainly COVID have forced change. Paul Bingham, a shipping specialist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, says the industry has learned to become more flexible.
PAUL BINGHAM: They did learn some lessons in terms of being able to make decisions more quickly about adjusting their capacity and how they're operating the networks, how they're interacting with customers.
NORTHAM: Shipping companies will be tested again now that the U.S. and China have agreed to dramatically lower tariffs for 90 days. American importers are rushing to get as many goods in the U.S. as possible during that time, putting pressure on shipping companies to increase capacity. Still, Maersk's van der Steene says the three-month reprieve doesn't bring any certainty to the industry.
VAN DER STEENE: We don't know that 90-day reprieve will hold. Unless that uncertainty is resolved, it will be very difficult to make any structural strategic decisions that will help us think about the future rather than the here and now.
NORTHAM: Jackie Northam, NPR News.
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