With Donald Trump winning Tuesday’s presidential election, retailers could soon be pacing to import more product into the U.S. ahead of anticipated tariffs expected to be imposed by his incoming administration.
Jason Miller, interim chairperson, department of supply chain management at Michigan State University’s Eli Broad College of Business, said the uncertainty surrounding tariffs is “the biggest question for a pull forward of imports based on the election outcome.”
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Retailers already front–loaded goods once in 2024, in the months ahead of the Oct. 1 East and Gulf Coast port strike. That escalation in imports was more related to the concerns of holiday product in U.S. warehouses, whereas this time, shippers would be more worried about potential costs incurred when the next administration enters the White House.
President-elect Trump has said he would impose universal tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on all U.S. imports, while goods from China would get slapped with a tariff ranging from 60 percent to as high as 100 percent. The anticipated duties have led analysts to surmise that container prices will escalate, thus potentially prompting retailers to bring in goods ahead of Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, 2025.
Shippers are mirroring decisions made during Trump’s first go-around as president, in which he announced tariffs of $200 billion worth of Chinese goods in July 2018. This led them to pull forward ocean imports in a rush to bring in the goods ahead of the tariffs’ implementation in September that year, and further escalation in early 2019.
Ocean import data from the National Retail Federation’s Global Port Tracker revealed that 2019 broke a nine-year streak of annual import volume growth into the U.S. Inbound cargo volumes dropped from 21.8 million in 2018 to 21.6 million in 2019.
“You could see that in volumes, they were pulled forward to the previous year. You still had relatively strong volumes in 2019, but you saw some of that shift,” said Judah Levine, head of research, Freightos Group. “In terms of available capacity and behavior of rates, that would probably be something that we will see again.”
With Trump’s inauguration still two months away and no timetable set for any tariff implementation, Levine expects a more gradual uptick in freight rates than in 2019, when they doubled from roughly $1,300 to $2,600 per container from Asia to the U.S. during the peak shipping season.