From tariffs to Covid: How policy shockwaves remade shipping seasons
 For more than a century, ocean shipping’s calendar has been as predictable as the tides. Importers and carriers could set their watches by the annual peak and slack seasons: spring build-up for summer retail, autumn surge ahead of the holidays, winter lull. But in the past decade, that pattern has been blown apart - not once, but twice - by policy shocks that had remarkably similar effects.
The first shock came from US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods. The tariffs were controversial enough, but what really scrambled the industry was how they were rolled out. Each new tranche of duties came with a grace period: a gap of weeks or months before the higher rate took effect.
The logic, politically, was to give businesses time to adjust. In practice, it created a stampede. Every importer with orders in the pipeline rushed to bring cargo in before the deadline. The result: capacity was swamped, traditional slack months vanished, and carriers enjoyed unseasonal booms.
The second shock was of a different nature but eerily similar in impact: the Covid scare. In early 2020, governments imposed health and safety restrictions on crews, ports, and manufacturing hubs. Factories closed, ships were quarantined, port workers fell ill. Then, as restrictions eased in stages, pent-up orders came flooding back. Once again, everyone in the supply chain tried to manufacture, ship and deliver as much as possible, as soon as possible. Seasonal flow was obliterated. Peak season lasted all year - only now it was coupled with pandemic-driven logistical jams.
Both episodes turned carriers’ schedules into a high-stakes game of musical chairs. The normal ebb and flow of demand was replaced by irregular, intense surges. Ships were double-booked, equipment was perpetually in the wrong place, and freight rates soared to record highs. The winners, inevitably, were the ocean carriers themselves.
In Covid times, those rates were nothing short of extraordinary. Container lines posted profits measured in the tens of billions. Governments saw the windfall too, and the tax bills that came with it. Carriers, in turn, reached for the oldest corporate tax-planning strategy in the book: reinvest before the revenue can be booked as profit.
In shipping, that means buying ships. And not just more of the same - the orders placed in 2021–2023 were for newbuilds with all the environmental bells and whistles: dual-fuel engines, LNG tanks, shore-power readiness, scrubbers, ballast-water treatment systems. These features aren’t purely about optics. They pre-empt costly retrofits that would otherwise be needed to meet tightening International Maritime Organisation (IMO) rules on sulphur emissions, greenhouse gas intensity and port-side pollution.
The shipyards loved it; so did the makers of marine engines and green-tech systems. But here’s the question the industry has barely begun to grapple with: what happens to all the tonnage these eco-ships will replace?
The current orderbook will, within a few years, push hundreds of older vessels into early retirement. Some will find second lives in niche trades or with operators serving less-regulated markets. Many will be recycled. The global shipbreaking yards in Alang, Chittagong, and Gadani may see a glut of steel not seen since the post-2008 financial crisis.
And that leads to another strategic possibility. A US administration with a will - and a willingness to adjust the Jones Act, which governs US domestic shipping — could snap up suitable hulls before they’re cut for scrap. With modifications, these could form the backbone of an expanded US-flag merchant fleet at a fraction of the cost and lead time of new domestic construction. For a president keen to bolster sealift capacity and reduce reliance on foreign-flag carriers in times of crisis, the opportunity is obvious.
Whether Donald Trump, in a second term, would move in that direction is an open question. His first-term trade policy showed a keen awareness of shipping’s leverage in global commerce. The tariff-driven cargo surges were collateral effects of economic statecraft, not ends in themselves. But a White House that saw tonnage as a national asset, rather than simply a market commodity, could marry surplus global capacity to domestic strategic goals.
The through-line from Trump’s tariffs to Covid’s restrictions is this: when policy jolts the system, the supply chain reacts not with gradual adjustment but with a rush to front-load activity. The result is the same whether the trigger is political or epidemiological — seasons collapse, demand bunches, and carriers, for a time, hold all the cards.
The shipping industry can’t prevent such shocks, but it can learn from them. For carriers, the lesson is that windfalls invite scrutiny - and that tax-driven fleet renewal has downstream consequences. For policymakers, it’s that the timing of rule changes matters as much as their content. And for shippers and forwarders, it’s that agility and contingency planning are no longer optional extras; they’re survival skills.
The pandemic’s chaos may have ebbed, but the structural changes it exposed are still with us. And if history is a guide, the next shock - tariff, treaty, or outbreak - will again scramble the calendar, reshape the fleet, and send ripples from the shipyard to the scrapyard. |
