For weeks, Jay Foreman, a toy company executive, froze all shipments from China, leaving Care Bears and Tonka trucks piled up at Chinese factories, to avoid paying President Trump’s crippling 145 percent tariff.
But as soon as his phone lit up at 4 a.m. on Monday alerting him that Mr. Trump was lowering tariffs on Chinese imports for 90 days, Mr. Foreman, the chief executive of Basic Fun, which is based in Florida, jumped out of bed and called his suppliers, instructing them to start shipping merchandise immediately.
“We’re starting to move everything,” Mr. Foreman said. “We have to call trucking companies in China to schedule pickups at the factories. And we have to book space on these container ships now.”
If other executives follow Mr. Foreman’s lead, a torrent of goods could soon pour into the United States. While logistics experts say global shipping lines and American ports appear capable of handling high volumes over the next three months, they caution that whiplash tariff policies are piling stress onto the companies that transport goods around the world.
“This keeps supply chain partners in limbo about what’s next, and leads to ongoing disruption,” said Rico Luman, senior economist for transport, logistics and automotive at ING Research.
After talks this weekend in Geneva, the Trump administration lowered tariffs on many Chinese imports to 30 percent from 145 percent. China cut its tariffs on American goods to 10 percent from 125 percent. If a deal is not reach in 90 days, the tariffs could go back up, though Mr. Trump said on Monday that they would not rise to 145 percent. Some importers may hold off on ordering from China, hoping for even lower tariffs later.
Importers weighing whether to rush goods in over the next 90 days must also determine if suppliers in China can fill those orders and get them onto vessels by the end of July. Voyages from Chinese ports to the West Coast of the United States can take two to three weeks.
Because the timing is tight, Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, does not expect a huge surge of imports in the coming weeks. “Ninety days is not a long runway for people in our business,” he said.
Mr. Seroka added that big retailers might have sufficient products at least for a while because they had brought in large volumes of goods before Mr. Trump’s tariffs took effect in April.
The 30 percent tariff is still high by historical standards, so importers may decide to pay it only for goods they really need.
But others may rush in shipments across the board. Mr. Foreman of Basic Fun said that while the 30 percent tax would pose a challenge to a medium-size company like his, it was manageable. He said he could discuss splitting the higher cost with his suppliers and the retailers that sold his products. At this tariff level, consumers can expect a roughly 15 percent increase in the price on some toys, he added.
The tariffs are one of many shocks to supply chains in recent years.
Spending during the coronavirus pandemic led to a deluge in imports that overwhelmed ports and shipping companies. And freight costs surged. Separately, low rainfall reduced the amount of water available to the Panama Canal, allowing fewer vessels to pass through. Then, in 2023, the Houthi militia in Yemen started attacking ships in the Red Sea, forcing most shipping lines to take a long detour around the southern tip of Africa. A dockworkers’ strike last year at ports on the East Coast of the United States caused more disruption.
Overall, supply chains functioned quite well after the upheavals of the pandemic.
Using the huge profits they earned during the pandemic, shipping lines bought scores of new vessels. As a result, they had the spare capacity to handle surges in volume and big disruptions like the detour around Africa.
The impact of Mr. Trump’s tariffs has been easy to spot in trade data. In the last five weeks, bookings to ship containers from China to the United States were 45 percent below the level in the same period last year, according to data from Vizion, a logistics technology company, and Dun & Bradstreet.
The Port of Los Angeles received 31 percent fewer containers last week than during the same week in 2024, while the number of vessels visiting the port was down 20 percent, Mr. Seroka said.
Now, shipping lines may have to reorganize their networks again, straining capacity. As a result, shipping rates could rise as much as 20 percent in the short term, said Peter Sand, chief analyst at Xeneta, a shipping market analytics company.
Lazaro Gamio contributed reporting.