Seatrade Maritime: USTR port fees to cost Cosco Shipping and OOCL $1.5bn in 2026

The impact of US port fees on Chinese-built and owned vessels will be “negligible” for non-Chinese container lines says HSBC Global Investment Research.

Chinese container lines Cosco Shipping Holdings and Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) will face the brunt of the impact from United States Trade Representative (USTR) port fees that will come into force in October according to a report from HSBC Global Investment Research.

The USTR fees for Chinese-built and Chinese owned ships calling the US will come into force on 14 October and although the final rules are yet to be announced, and the report looked at the potential costs to container lines.

“Non-Chinese carriers will be levied a port fee only if they deploy Chinese-built ships on US port calls. We believe they have sufficient non-China built ships to deploy to avoid the fees,” HSBC said in the report.

HSBC said that 71% of global container ship capacity was non-Chinese built, and that just 21% capacity on the Transatlantic and Transpacific trades was China-built tonnage, and only 15% of US port calls in 2024 were made by Chinese-constructed vessels.

The report noted that Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd in their Gemini Cooperation already deploy Korean-built tonnage on the Transpacific, while the Premier Alliance plans to split its current Mediterranean Pacific South 2 (MS2) pendulum service into two removing 10 Chinese-built ships in the process.

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While most major container lines will be largely unaffected by the fees the same cannot be said for the two largest Chinese carriers – Cosco Shipping Holdings, and Hong Kong-headquartered Orient Overseas Ltd (OOIL), which operates OOCL, and is in turn majority owned by Cosco Shipping Holdings.

HSBC calculated the potential cost for Cosco Shipping and OOCL based on incurring a fee of $600 per feu, based on 27% of the current Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI) rate for Shanghai – US West Coast for a 10,000 teu ship.

For Cosco Shipping using figures from Alphaliner that it has 86 ships calling US ports as of 1 August 2025 the company would be hit with estimated USTR port fees of $1.53 billion in 2026. Based on the assumption that OOCL accounts for 42% of Cosco Shipping’s Transpacific volumes and 50% of Transatlantic volumes, OOIL’s share of USTR port fees in 2026 would be an estimated $654 million.

However, Cosco Shipping and OOCL could look to reduce this exposure by with their alliance partners.

“CSH and OOIL could have their partners in the Ocean Alliance, CMA CGM, and Evergreen, deploy more non-Chinese built ships in the TP [Transpacific] route while CSH and OOIL add capacity in other routes. They could also resort to services that bypass the US and rely on transhipments from Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean which could increase demand for feeder services,” the HSBC report said.