The price of container shipping from China to the US has risen dramatically in the last year due to uncertainty about the two economic giants’ ongoing trade dispute.
The price of shipping a container from China to the United States has risen dramatically in the last year due to uncertainty surrounding trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.
That’s because Chinese exporters have been rushing to get goods to U. S. ports before new tariffs kick in, but data are suggesting that trend may soon run out of steam.
China and the U. S., the world’s two largest economies, have been locked in a tit-for-tat tariff fight over the last year, levying duties on each other’s imports worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the last few months. Increasingly strong fears of an all-out trade war have inspired exporters to push forward shipment dates — a phenomenon called front-loading.
In fact, freight prices for containers going from China to the U. S. have surged more than 100 percent from a year ago as of the beginning of December, according to data from Freightos, an online freight marketplace,
«Transpacific ocean freight peak season has been a bonanza, with prices still more than double last year,» said a report on the most recent Freightos data published on the Baltic Exchange’s news website.
That was as freight rates for China to the U. S. West Coast jumped 128 percent while those from China to the U. S. East Coast surged 123 percent compared to the same period a year ago.
In contrast, China to North Europe freight rates were up just 11 percent in the same period due to pre-Christmas cargoes.
