A New Era For Global Freight
Shippers Await Clarity on Tariffs and Trade Policies Before Reconfiguring International Supply Chains
[Stay on top of transportation news: .]
Global freight flows have entered a period of transformation as the U.S.-led trade war and other policy changes have upended the business landscape for international shipping.
Over the course of this year, steeper and oft-changing tariffs have roiled supply chains, but longer term, these substantial levies on U.S. imports hold the potential to fundamentally alter existing freight patterns if businesses relocate production as a result.
For now, though, the final outcomes of this trade reconfiguration remain unclear, leaving shippers to operate in an uncertain environment until the new reality for international commerce comes into clearer focus.
Normally the supply chain is “phenomenally resilient” because shippers and transportation providers can plan around disruptions, but they can’t adapt to the unknown, said Lars Jensen, CEO and partner at container shipping consultancy .
“The challenge for the North American supply chain right now is the utter lack of predictability,” he said during a Sept. 16 panel discussion at the Intermodal Association of North America’s Intermodal Expo 2025 in Long Beach, Calif.
Tariff rules and regulations change on an almost daily basis with extremely short time frames for companies to adjust, Jensen said.
As a result, shippers of both U.S. imports and exports have largely stuck with the existing supply chain setups they already had in place.
“Nobody’s structurally changing anything until it’s a stable landscape,” Jensen said.
Instead, shippers have resorted to “day-to-day firefighting” to respond to the latest policy changes and supply chain disruptions.
This year has been a roller coaster ride for port activity, with demand surges ahead of anticipated tariff hikes followed by slowdowns when higher levies go into effect.
Despite the shock and disruption caused by the trade war, the global freight industry is accustomed to volatility.
“We’ve seen this type of thing before,” said Brian Kobza, chief commercial officer at IMC Logistics. “This is never an even-keel volume business. Unfortunately, it’s peaks and valleys. Our job is to navigate how high the peaks are and how low the valleys are.”
In this unpredictable environment, many trucking and logistics firms as well as beneficial cargo owners have postponed major business decisions.
“If you don’t have certainty, you can’t predict what is going to happen in the future [and] you can’t predict where the market is going to be, it makes it much more difficult to invest,” Kobza said.
He also noted that the prolonged freight rate recession has created a “very difficult market” for motor carriers.
Despite those challenges, IMC has been ramping up its investments in its drivers, assets and locations, even in a down market.
“We are continuing to invest and trying to grow, but doing it prudently and profitably,” Kobza said.
The marine drayage and landside logistics provider has been expanding its menu of transportation options to help its customers navigate disruptions and uncertainty.
In addition to draying to transload locations and distribution centers, IMC has diversified its service offerings by partnering with Class I railroads to move international containers via train.
“We are working in overtime, trying to create solutions that can be both the current solution, and be nimble enough to change in the future,” Kobza said. “There are a lot of different solutions that we’ve been crafting for our customers.”
While it is difficult to prepare for the unknown, companies such as IMC are turning to their customers for guidance.
“We get back down to basics and we listen to our customers,” Kobza said. “What do they need now? What do they think they need in the future? And then we craft our strategy around that.”
Trade Policy Changes
Once a new baseline for trade is established, the flow of freight coming into North America will change if businesses diversify their supply chains to reduce reliance on China.
Lars Jensen (center) of Vespucci Maritime discusses global freight trends alongside intermodal consultant Larry Gross and moderator Adriene Bailey of consulting firm Oliver Wyman at IANA’s Intermodal Expo 2025. (Seth Clevenger/Transport Topics)
In this overhauled global trading system, Jensen of Vespucci Maritime projects that U.S.-bound freight volumes will gradually shift from the West Coast to the East Coast.
In another major policy shift, the U.S. began imposing hefty fees on Chinese-built or -operated vessels docking at U.S. ports starting Oct. 14, but recently suspended those fees for a year after the countries reached a trade truce.
Meanwhile, cross-border trade within North America will also be in the spotlight with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, up for joint review by July 2026.
That process already has begun with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative soliciting public comments in September and setting a public hearing on Nov. 17.
Domestically, the transportation industry is closely watching the planned merger of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, which would create a transcontinental freight railroad controlled by a single enterprise and could alter intermodal transportation within the United States.
Capacity and Equipment Costs
Tim Denoyer, vice president and senior analyst at , said the trucking industry has continued to feel the ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a lot of service failures in trucking and intermodal when it took hold five years ago.
“Shippers couldn’t get over that for a while,” Denoyer said during a panel discussion at Intermodal Expo.
As a result, many shippers expanded their private fleets and purchased more trucks to regain control over their supply chains that they lost during the pandemic.
That private fleet expansion increased industry capacity and contributed to the excess capacity in the trucking market that has held down freight rates for 3½ years.
Trucks line up at the Nogales-Mariposa port of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border.(Rebecca Noble/Bloomberg News)
“One of the biggest reasons we’ve had such a long for-hire downturn over the last few years is that private fleets went and bought tons of trucks,” Denoyer said. “They insourced a lot of freight.”
More recently, the ongoing trade war has been pushing up the cost of trucking equipment.
The Trump administration imposed a 25% tariff on heavy- and medium-duty trucks manufactured outside the U.S. starting Nov. 1, although the levies only apply to the non-U.S. content of USMCA-compliant trucks. Truck makers also are navigating the effect of earlier tariffs on materials such as steel and aluminum.
With Class 8 truck production dropping below normal replacement levels, private carriers are already beginning to shrink their fleets at a considerable pace, Denoyer said.
“We think we’ll have some considerable tightening in the equipment market,” he said.
Eventually, Denoyer added, that will lead to more freight coming back to for-hire motor carriers and intermodal service providers.
Cargo Security
While contending with shifting supply chains and soft freight rates, trucking and logistics companies also are battling a surge in freight fraud and cargo theft.
“It is making our jobs so much harder,” said Shelli Austin, president of intermodal transportation provider .
She highlighted the sophistication of cargo thieves that are specifically targeting high-value shipments.
“They absolutely know what they are hitting and what they are targeting, and it’s constant,” Austin said.
The perpetual threat of cargo theft is forcing businesses to spend significant time focusing on protecting themselves from bad actors, which pulls energy and resources away from the core mission of moving freight and providing customer service.
“This is not just a railroad issue. This is not just a trucking issue. This is a whole industry issue, including the shippers, including the [beneficial cargo owners],” Austin said. “We all have to work together.”
Artificial Intelligence
Transportation and logistics companies also are beginning to embrace the latest advances in artificial intelligence, which have been unlocking smarter decision-making across the supply chain.
Want more news? Listen to today's daily briefing above or go here for more info
By implementing AI capabilities, businesses can better equip themselves to handle the increasingly unpredictable nature of global logistics, said Maneet Singh, chief information officer and chief digital officer at Odyssey Logistics.
“The way we look at it at Odyssey is disruption is the new normal,” Singh said. “AI is a part of the solution. We should plan our systems and technology to be adaptable for the next disruption, not just for past disruptions.”
However, deploying AI in an effective manner requires a solid foundation of data and information technology, he said.
Singh has been leading a digital transformation at Odyssey, including establishing a centralized “data lake” that brings together information from its various systems into a single place.
That data is the key to helping customers understand their best multimodal transportation and warehousing options as they orchestrate their supply chains.
By applying AI to that data, the logistics company can extract better insights from that information and support scenario planning.
“AI helps us parse through our vast amount of data based on past performance and the cost and the carbon footprint,” Singh said. “A human would be hard pressed to do all those things. That’s where AI helps.”
