The proposed fee structure suggested by the US Trade Representative targeting ships ‘made in China’ could distort competition between the big liner operators serving US ports. The proposed action includes fees of up to $1.5m per port entrance for Chinese-built vessels.
Some carriers would barely be concerned, whilst others such as ZIM or CMA CGM would be affected more strongly.
To assess the potential effect of this fee structure, Alphaliner looked at all calls of container ships of more than 1,000 teu operated by the top 10 carriers at the twenty biggest US ports in the month of February.
We counted 1,002 port calls, 190 of which were made by Chinese-built ships (19%). All these calls were realized by 488 different vessels. While the proposed fee structure would be imposed because of the dominant role of China as a maritime nation, we see that a majority of all container ships serving the US were built in South Korea (54.5%). China comes in second place (20.9%) and is followed by Japan (12.3%).
The impact of fees for ships ‘made in China’ would be very different from carrier to carrier. Evergreen last February made 53 calls at US ports, but none of these concerned Chinese-built vessels. HMM (15 calls only) only deployed Korea-built tonnage. Yang Ming (23 calls) only had one ‘Chinese’ call at Tacoma with the 12,726 teu YM TRUTH on charter from Costamare and built in 2020 by Yangzijiang Shipbuilding.
Source: Alphaliner
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