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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.”
The real damage, he said, came less from the tariffs themselves than from sudden announcements that triggered a rush of cargo before a deadline, only for conditions to return to normal once it passed.
“That is probably the element that has hurt us most,” he said.
Carriers can respond to a surge by chartering extra vessels and running a new swing, which Mr van Eynde said had even lifted freight rates in their favour. Terminal capacity could not move at the same speed, building more takes years to plan and permit, he said, and by the time it was ready, demand may already have shifted again.
“We are the ones taking the biggest hit from these kind of things,” he continued.
Despite the uncertainty, Mr van Eynde said TiL was investing more aggressively than ever, pointing to its position as the main terminal partner for MSC, the biggest carrier and still growing faster than the market, he added, as a way to offset the political risk in its portfolio.
Deploying extra gangs and equipment could absorb a sudden peak, he explained, but it brought congestion to the yard and the rail operation, and a higher cost per box.
“It’s certainly eating out of our margins,” he said.