The focus of U.S. economic activity has shifted squarely to the nation’s east and west coasts, where the major shipping ports are now in the spotlight. Companies, investors, and industries across the country are closely watching these gateways, anxious to see how developments in trade, tariffs, and the broader economy will unfold.
Signs of what might happen can be hard to read, given the need to prognosticate using nearly real-time data. April 9 was the last date goods from China could be loaded on freighters without facing the 145% tariffs, as CNN reported. Given the typical 2- to 4-week shipping time, those ships are likely already in the U.S.
The Wall Street Journal noted that some currently popular metrics for gauging shipping are more in-depth examinations of ship traffic into Southern California ports. These metrics and others are often based on so-called twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) — a measure of volume of a standard 20-foot intermodal shipping container.
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The Journal pulled data from the Marine Exchange of Southern California. It estimates that the number of container ships expected at Southern California ports in the next few weeks will decrease by about 40% from mid-April levels. Chief executive Ryan Petersen of San Francisco-based freight forwarder Flexport told the paper that China-to-U.S. bookings have decreased by 60% since April 9.
NBC reported that the Southern California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have together seen a 44% year-over-year drop in docked ships in the week of May 4.
“About a third of the import volume, which means, give or take, about 50,000 twenty-foot equivalent units, gone off the arrivals coming in next week,” Port of Los Angeles executive director Gene Seroka, told Bloomberg Television last week.
Part of the drop is due to importers front-loading their orders, stocking up on a wide range of goods and materials before the heftier tariffs took effect. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ container capacity figures show how unusually high shipments have been in 2025. Except for one point in early April, total weekly TEU capacity counts from March 2 through April 27 soared above the equivalent point in any year from 2019 through 2024.
During those nine weeks, comparing 2025 weekly shipments to the next higher number, regardless of the year, ports saw an additional 1.21 million TEUs. Some significant percentage of lower shipments are due to their having arrived earlier than they otherwise would.
However, that doesn’t erase the current drop in volume and its potential impact. Seroka said that truckers who were hauling four or five containers in a week will be down to two or three. Every four containers lost means a dockworker job. CEOs are saying their companies won’t continue importing at the current prices as they don’t know how long the conditions will last. Hiring, they say, is off the table, and capital investment is paused. Retailers say that even if the end result will be 10% tariffs, that will get passed along to the consumer.
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