The USA is getting serious with the announced port fees for Chinese or Chinese-built ships.
The threat has been floating around for a few weeks, but now it is becoming concrete. The fees announced by the USA for port calls will become due in around six months’ time.
The new “penalty fees” will affect all ships built in China. According to the Americans, there will be two variants of billing, whereby the more expensive of the two will always apply.
Either $120 per unloaded container will have to be paid for port calls in the USA from mid-October, with the amount to be increased to $250 over the next three years. Alternatively, $18 per ship tonne will be payable, rising to $33 per tonne after three years. A ship transporting 8,000 containers would therefore have to pay just under $1 million.
Ships in Chinese ownership or under Chinese control will be hit even harder. They will have to pay a flat rate of $50 per net tonne. The amount will then rise to $140 by 2028.
The fee is to be levied once per voyage, regardless of the number of port calls, and a maximum of five times per year. However, it does not apply to container ships with a capacity of less than 4,000 TEU. However, the fee is waived for calls in the Great Lakes, the Caribbean and the US territories and generally for routes of less than 2,000 nm.
US ships and ships in ballast are also exempt from the fee. The fee can also be suspended for up to three years if a shipowner orders and takes delivery of a US-built ship with the same capacity.
This means that the costs are somewhat lower than expected. Originally, there was to be a sliding scale of fees according to the proportion of Chinese ships in an operator’s fleet and a flat fee of up to $1 million per call if the proportion of ships from China was higher than 25% or more. A similar proposal based on the percentage of orders placed in China was also dropped by the US administration.
