With no pre-warning, the US Administration and China announced that they had reached an agreement, partly pausing tariffs for 90 days – we say ‘partly’ because the US is still imposing a baseline 30% tariff (down from 145%), cumulative with specific tariffs, (25% on steel and aluminium) and China went down from 125% to 10%.

In the past four weeks, shipping lines have been trying to reduce Transpacific capacity, due to a drop-off in bookings as a direct consequence of the tariffs. Now, with this latest development, the lines need to ramp capacity up quickly, to accommodate for an expected surge in bookings, because getting cargo into the US before the new August 14th cut-off, requires peak season cargo to be shipped no later than by mid-July.

To see whether there have been any immediate changes in capacity, in Issue 715 of the Sunday Spotlight, we looked at the changes in capacity for the period of May 12-July 21, as it was on May 16 compared to as it was on May 9. On the Transpacific trade to the North America West Coast, there is not yet a meaningful injection of new capacity in the immediate future. (....)