Tom van Eynde, Director Terminal Investments North America for TiL Group told TOC Americas in Cartagena that sudden tariff announcements, not tariff levels themselves, trigger costly cargo surges terminals cannot absorb.
Tariffs are relocating container trade rather than destroying it, Tom van Eynde of the Swiss-based terminal operator TiL Group told TOC Americas in Cartagena, pointing to cargo shifting from Canadian ports into TiL’s US terminals as evidence.
“It has been somewhat of a wild ride over the past year, the past 2 years,” van Eynde said, referring to tariffs in the US being introduced and then cancelled. “They’re not really reducing the trade flows, they’re just relocating them.”
“…certain trade flows to the US through the Canadian ports were being reduced, we saw them automatically being picked up in our terminals in US ports…” he said.
Van Eynde said TiL still expects the disruption to ease. “We still expect that this is going to be a temporary thing,” he said, adding that once tariffs settle into a range of 10 to 15%, “at that kind of level we see very little impact anymore on the volume.”
The real damage, van Eynde said, comes less from the tariffs themselves than from sudden announcements that trigger a rush of cargo before a deadline, only for conditions to return to normal once it passes. “That is probably the element that has hurt us most,” he said.
Carriers can respond to a surge by chartering extra vessels and running a new swing, which van Eynde said has even lifted freight rates in their favour. Terminal capacity cannot move at the same speed: building more takes years to plan and permit, van Eynde said, and by the time it’s ready, demand may already have shifted again. “We are the ones who are taking the biggest hit from these kind of things,” he said.
Despite the uncertainty, van Eynde said TiL is investing more aggressively than ever, pointing to its position as the main terminal partner for MSC, which he said is the biggest carrier and still growing faster than the market, as a way to offset the political risk in its portfolio.
Deploying extra gangs and equipment can absorb a sudden peak, van Eynde said, but it brings congestion to the yard and the rail operation, and a higher cost per box. “It’s certainly eating out of our margins,” he said.