US container growth vanishes with world trade flows ‘moving on’

US container imports ended 2025 in a four-month skid that’s likely to lengthen this year as trade shifts to other economies to avoid President Donald Trump’s tariffs, according to a shipping industry analyst’s tally of the country’s top 10 ports.

Inbound volumes in December dropped 6.4% from a year earlier to 1.9 million 20-foot container units, after a 5.7% slide the previous month, according to John McCown, who publishes a monthly report that captures flows through America’s biggest gateways for seaborne cargo.

“The downward turn in 2025 was due solely to tariffs,” McCown wrote. “Unfortunately there is nothing at present that suggests it will be short-lived.”

Trump has used import taxes — actual or threatened — as leverage against trading partners, hoping to reduce the US trade deficit and increase domestic production. In response, major economies such as China and the European Union are seeking ways to reduce their reliance on the American market, and signing trade deals with other countries or blocs.

The result is an upheaval in international commerce that ING Groep NV economists this week called “a global recalibration and the start of a new era.” The US, previously a leader in growth rates for container shipping, is now lagging much of the world.

Port operations from Los Angeles to Houston and New York turned in solid full-year numbers for total volumes handled, but each facility tracked by McCown posted year-over-year declines in imports in December.

That’s partly because companies stockpiled foreign-made parts and merchandise in the first half of 2025 to get ahead of Trump’s levies — many of them imposed in August — and then relied on those inventories in the second half, whipsawing demand for container shipping.

Import volumes through the Port of Los Angeles, the country’s busiest for maritime cargo, increased 3.3% during the first half of 2025 from a year earlier and dropped 4.2% in the second. Through the first four weeks of 2026, they’re down 2.2%, the Port of LA and Wabtec Corp.’s preliminary data showed.

Watching container traffic offers insights into the economy because ships move 79% of the US’s international freight tonnage, rail and pipelines account for about 14%, and trucks and planes 7%, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
As demand for ocean cargo softens, spot container rates that fell through January may keep going down, according to Peter Sand, chief analyst with Xeneta, a digital freight platform in Oslo.

“The market is set to turn further in the favor of shippers rather than carriers with further softening freight rates,” he wrote in a note this week.

Add Trump’s trade policy uncertainty to the supply-demand mix and the volatility that marked 2025 “is here to stay,” ING economists Julian Geib and Rico Luman wrote in a research report Friday, noting that Trump continues to make tariff threats.

They predict global trade growth this year of just 0.5% to 1%, compared with 4.2% in 2025.

That tepid outlook aligns with the World Trade Organization’s forecast published in October, though its leader recently said there’s a potential upside tied to surging demand for equipment needed to power artificial intelligence.

Supply Rerouting

“There’s been tremendous disruption — the biggest we’ve seen in 80 years,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the WTO’s director-general, said in a Bloomberg TV interview last week in Davos, Switzerland.

Still, she said “businesses are adapting” and “what we see is increasing diversification of trade and people trying to route their supply chains in ways where they can deal with uncertainty.”

McCown’s analysis includes a parallel look at global container data that illustrate how inbound volumes through North America — with the US accounting for about five-sixths of that total — have gone from a world leader to a laggard in growth rates.

North American imports fell 3.9% in November from a year earlier, while global volume grew 7.2%. Here’s a chart showing that reversal based on McCown’s three-month trailing average:

Imports into Africa jumped 25.3% in November, while the Middle East-India region saw a rise of 16.4%. The increases were 14.6% for Latin America and 11.3% for Europe.

“Volume growth in most regions remains robust and world trade is moving on without the US,” McCown wrote. “World container supply chains have begun to adapt and reconfigure trading patterns faster than I would have thought while US volume languishes and declines.”