U.S. port fees, scheduled to take effect on October 14 but still lacking finalized rules, are expected to disadvantage Chinese carriers and delay the retirement of non-China-built vessels as ocean carriers adjust their fleets to absorb the added costs.
An HSBC report on global container shipping said the US Trade Representative's (USTR) port fees targeting Chinese carriers are scheduled to take effect from October 14, 2025.
While the final rules are yet to be announced, the U.S. Customs & Border Protection is already working on a system to collect such fees.
"While we do not model for these fees, we illustrate the potential costs in this report. Further dilution or scrapping of the port fees would be a positive catalyst for Chinese carriers," analysts at HSBC Global Investment Research said.
The report noted that non-Chinese carriers begin their network reconfiguration: non-Chinese carriers will be levied a port fee only if they deploy Chinese-built ships on US port calls.
"We believe they have sufficient non-China-built ships (exhibit 3) to deploy to avoid the fees."
Currently, 71% of the global container capacity by TEU is non-China built vs 21% capacity deployment by TEU in transpacific (TP) and transatlantic (TA) routes and just 15% of 2024 US port calls by tonnage that were with Chinese-built vessels.
It added that Maersk and Hapag Lloyd already deploy Korea-built ships in the TP route. The Premier Alliance will split its current Mediterranean Pacific South 2 (MS2) pendulum service into two separate services, which, as per Linerlytica, will enable it to remove 10 China-built ships on US port calls.
"We illustrate that from October 2025, Chinese lines could incur a fee of US$600/FEU (27% of the latest SCFI Shanghai-USWC spot rate) for a 10k TEU ship," the report said.
"We illustrate US$1.5 billion of port fees for CSH in 2026e, which equates to 5.3% of consensus 2026e revenues vs consensus EBIT margin forecast of 7.1%. For OOIL, we calculate port fees of US$654m equating to 7.1% of consensus 2026e revenues vs 10.9% consensus EBIT margin forecast (exhibits 8-9)."
Meanwhile, HSBC said Chinese carriers could partly mitigate the impact: CSH and OOIL could have their partners in the Ocean Alliance, CMA CGM, and Evergreen, deploy more non-Chinese-built ships in the TP route while CSH and OOIL add capacity in other routes.
They could also resort to services that bypass the US and rely on transhipments from Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean which could increase demand for feeder services.
Potentially tighter demand-supply in the near term
"The network realignment by Chinese and non-Chinese carriers could temporarily reduce services and tighten capacity," HSBC said.
It added that the port fee could also delay the scrapping of non-China-built vessels, which equates to 93% of the 20 years+ older container fleet (12.5% of the overall fleet).
