Tariff anouncements cause cargo chaos for box terminals, says TiL

Sudden tariff announcements, not tariff levels themselves, trigger costly cargo surges that terminals cannot absorb, delegates at TOC Americas in Cartagena were told.

Rather than destroying container trade, said TiL Group’s director for terminal investments in North America, Tom van Eynde, tariffs were relocating it, pointing to cargo shifting from Canadian ports into TiL’s US terminals as evidence.

“It has been somewhat of a wild ride over the past year, the past two years,” Mr van Eynde noted, referring to tariffs in the US being introduced and then cancelled. “They’re not really reducing the trade flows, they’re just relocating them.”

While the terminal operator saw a reduction in certain trade flows to the US through Canadian ports, he said these were then automatically being picked up by TiL terminals in US ports. Expecting the situation to be “a temporary thing”, Mr van Eynde said he expected disruption to settle once tariffs hit a range of 10% to 15% – “at that kind of level we see very little impact anymore on the volume.”

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