Report release and publisher background

Waterloo, Ontario-based Descartes, a provider of on-demand logistics software delivered as a service, has published the latest edition of its Global Shipping Report. The release is the report’s 56th edition, tracing the series back to its first issue in August 2021.

March U.S.-bound container volumes and rankings

March U.S.-bound container imports totaled 2,353,611 TEU (Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units). That level represented a 12.4% increase from the prior month and a 1.1% decline versus March a year earlier, marking the fourth-highest monthly total on record.

February comparison and broader volume trends

In its prior edition, Descartes had reported that February imports fell 9.7% from January and were down 6.5% compared with the same month a year earlier. The firm said March’s rebound is consistent with normal seasonality after February’s dip, and reflects steady underlying demand amid ongoing policy and geopolitical uncertainties.

The report also noted that volumes remain well above pre-pandemic levels, up 32.3% relative to March 2019, while year-to-date imports through March were down 4.8% versus the prior year.

Risks, responses and industry commentary

Jackson Wood, Director of Industry Strategy at Descartes, warned that escalating tensions in the Middle East, changes in U.S. tariff policy and shifting global trade dynamics are adding volatility to routing, costs and sourcing choices. He said importers are responding by diversifying suppliers beyond traditional trade lanes, adjusting routing strategies to mitigate geopolitical risk, and using data and technology to make faster, better-informed decisions in a more complex trade environment.

China-origin imports and Lunar New Year timing

Containers arriving in the U.S. from China totaled 711,652 TEU in March. That figure was 2.3% lower than January and down 1.1% year over year. It was also 30.4% below the peak of 1,022,913 TEU recorded in July 2024.

China’s share of total U.S. imports stood at 30.2% in March, a 4.6 percentage-point decline from February. Descartes observed that the drop in China-origin volumes may partly reflect lingering effects from the 2026 Lunar New Year, which ran from February 17 through March 3; typical transit times of 30 to 50 days can shift production slowdowns into March arrival data.

Top 10 source countries and notable month-to-month movers

Imports from the top 10 countries of origin rose 8.2% sequentially in March, an aggregate gain of 122,671 TEU. Two countries accounted for much of that increase:

• Italy, up 74.5%, adding 25,565 TEU
• Thailand, up 25.6%, adding 24,682 TEU

Additional report items

The Descartes Global Shipping Report contained other key findings beyond the items summarized here. The excerpt provided did not include those additional specifics.

More than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated most of the Trump administration's tariffs imposed under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, companies are taking a variety of approaches to obtaining refunds for tariffs they paid and hoping for the best.

Only a small fraction of the more than 300,000 companies subject to President Donald Trump’s IEEPA tariffs have sued for refunds in the U.S. Court of International Trade, according to Jonathan Todd, an international trade attorney at Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff. These tend to be larger firms with bigger legal budgets and/or more money at stake, he and other experts said.

More than 3,000 cases related to tariffs, duties, fees and other taxes have been filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade since the Supreme Court first heard oral arguments about the tariff case on Nov. 5., 2025, according to Manufacturing Dive research. Not all cases are related to IEEPA refunds.

Todd said many more companies have filed administrative claims with U.S. Customs and Border Protection or are waiting to apply for refunds through the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries system, or CAPE, a new CBP digital portal that is scheduled to go live in April. Others are biding their time because they’re not sure how to proceed.

“I have a number of clients who want to take every action they can, and those tend to file lawsuits," Todd said in an interview with Manufacturing Dive. “Others are waiting because they see this as an evolving situation that we will have greater clarity on soon.”

He added that some of his clients are reluctant to ask for refunds at all because of the administrative hassle or “for political and commercial reasons,” such as possible retribution from the Trump administration.

Refund claims could result in lawsuits

Seeking a refund could even land an importer in court.

“One of the things that’s kind of missing from the headlines is that through the CBP’s CAPE system, the party entitled to the refunds will be the importer of record,” Todd said. “But that very well might not be the party that bore the total cost.”

That’s because importers might have passed tariff costs onto manufacturers and other firms down the supply chain. This “raises the question of whether downstream customers are also entitled to refunds, such as suppliers who lowered prices for their customers,” he said.

These dynamics have resulted in unintended consequences for some importers, including being sued by other companies. “I have clients who have spoken publicly about seeking refunds for their customers, and some have found themselves as defendants in class action lawsuits,” Todd said.

Like Todd, James Kim, a customs and international trade attorney at ArentFox Schiff, said his clients are employing a variety of strategies when it comes to tariff refunds.

“The companies that are taking the most aggressive approach are filing lawsuits in an abundance of caution to make sure they can recover the refunds,” he said in an interview with Manufacturing Dive. “Others are filing administrative protests, while others are waiting for the CBP system to come up. No one really knows for certain what they should be doing because the Supreme Court was completely silent on the whole refund process.”

One significant problem, Kim said, is that CAPE may not capture all refund-related administrative claims because of the way it’s designed.

“When companies import goods and pay tariffs, that’s really a deposit or an estimate of what tariffs they think they should pay,” he said. “Then CBP has almost a year to finalize that duty assessment and say the company owes more or paid too much.”

The issue is that while the Court of International Trade has recently ordered CBP to start issuing refunds for duty assessments that are final, CBP has said that CAPE’s first iteration won’t be designed to handle refunds for assessments that are final, Kim said.

Some have also criticized the CAPE process as unduly burdensome. For example, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., ranking member on the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, wrote a letter with other Democrats to Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney S. Scott saying that refunds should be automatic rather than requiring importers to “opt in,” which is how the system will initially be set up.

“There is no principled reason for the Trump administration to conduct the refund process this way,” the senators said. “Small businesses should not have to do additional work to receive refunds on what amounted to illegal tariff payments.”

Many companies think refunds likely

In a recent KPMG survey of business leaders, 62% of respondents said they expected a tariff refund. Of that group, 28% said they would actively pursue a refund, 25% were undecided and 9% said they would not.

“It’s a pretty big number in the trying-to-figure-it-out bucket” when it comes to deciding whether and how to seek a refund, Brian Higgins, U.S. sector leader for industrial manufacturing for KPMG U.S., said in an interview with Manufacturing Dive. “There’s still a lack of clarity on the mechanics of the overall refund process.”

Of those that have decided not seek refunds, 37% said the anticipated legal costs or effort outweighed the potential refund. Other respondents cited concern about negative impact on government relations and low potential refund amounts.

Higgins said he believes that importers that filed lawsuits before the Supreme Court’s Feb. 20 tariff decision are in the best position to secure refunds. That’s because the government will only have so much bandwidth, and those who filed lawsuits early will likely be higher in the pecking order, he said. However, he added for all claimants, the exact nature of the refunds and length of the process remain unclear, although CBP has stated that it expects an up to 45-day window between submission and refund delivery.

Still, Kelsey Christensen, an international trade attorney at Clark Hill, was optimistic about the process overall. “It is very likely that companies will eventually obtain IEEPA refunds if they properly request them from CBP,” she said in an email to Manufacturing Dive.

This, she said, will require a few steps. First, a company should determine exactly what it’s entitled to and get all of its paperwork in order.

“Organize, organize, organize,” Christensen said. “It is vital for companies to identify all of their imports that had IEEPA tariff exposure and gather entry documentation so that the business is prepared to request refunds when the [CBP’s] refund portal becomes available in mid-April.”

Second, she said based on recent declarations from CBP about the process it’s setting up, “it appears that companies will need to proactively request refunds, provide CBP with the entry documents supporting their request, and enroll banking details to make sure they can receive refunds electronically.”

CBP stopped issuing paper refund checks in February, she added, so the requirement to enroll banking information online may be new for many importers.

Even though the Supreme Court didn’t address refunds in its February decision, Christensen said that shouldn’t be an obstacle.

“We did not expect the Supreme Court to discuss refunds in its tariff opinion, and we do not think that has any bearing on whether companies will or will not receive refunds,” she said. “It is common for other courts, like the Court of International Trade, to take the lead on establishing the details of a remedy process.”

Regardless of how likely it is for a company to obtain a refund, Todd said it’s important for companies not to think of it as a windfall. “The No. 1 thing that everyone should do in my view is have a conversation with their accountants,” he said. “Those monies might not be available to you dollar-for-dollar.”

Moreover, Trump has instituted new tariffs and has altered others such as for steel, aluminum and copper. He also has frequently changes his tariff policies, even as they are challenged in court. As a result, experts noted that even if companies obtain IEEPA tariff refunds, there will likely be more tariffs to deal with under other legislative authorities, as well as still in place levies.

This article was written by Jeffrey Kinney from Supply Chain Dive and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.

Truckload freight rates are favoring carriers after a long hiatus, according to the March Signal Report, which was recently issued by DAT iQ, the analytics subsidiary of DAT Freight & Analytics, with the firm explaining that market tightening, since December, “is real and will continue.” The firm explained that, in February, dry van and temperature-controlled markets experienced their largest three-month spot rates increase going back to Spring 2020, coming in at 21% and 13%, respectively, with the caveat that this data does not extend through February 28, when the Iran conflict began, while also noting that the conflict has, and will continue to, send rates up and also continue to trim down capacity. The pricing data in this report is based on actual loads moved by large retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, and other industry stakeholders in DAT iQ’s shipper consortium. The March Signal Report issued the following for February: Looking ahead, the 12-month forecast from Dat iQ expects dry van contract and spot rates to head up by 8% and 12%, respectively, with the company telling shippers that are still operating on 2025 pricing, the window to secure favorable pricing terms is “probably closed,” coming in before the fuel cost gains start to appear in the numbers. In an interview with LM, DAT Chief of Analytics Ken Adamo that there are a few key things to consider in looking at contract and spot rates, in terms of where things may be headed. “On the spot side, there is seasonality coming up and depending on how the spring and summer shipping season go, there are going to be some seasonal effects there,” he said. “I do think there is some upward mobility in spot rates, for sure. But we have this interesting conundrum where spot rates are up about 20% year-over-year, and New Rate Differential is up 7%-to-10%, depending on what sector you look at. But paid contract rates are dead flat. That creates this massive amount of tension, where the longer spot rates stay elevated, it is eventually going to drag the paid contract rates up, and normally that only lags by a couple of months. We are probably at a couple of quarters now and it has not pulled the contract rates up.” One reason for that, he said, is that a lot of the spot market disruption was acute, in that it was due to weather and fuel, leaving shippers not keen on making long-term business decisions, nor upsetting their entire routing guide until they see what the market looks like later, when the weather disruptions are not as severe and the Iran conflict is possibly over. To that end, as an example, Adamo said that some large shippers are postponing some of their bid events until later in the year, and the ones that signed deals in the fourth quarter are willing to absorb a spot market loss somewhat, as opposed to doing a rebid during a time of volatility. “A large Fortune 500 shipper would explain right now it is struggling to understand fuel, it did not budget for this,” said Adamo. “And 30% of a shipper’s freight spend has gone up by 50% in rough numbers. Honestly, the rates they are paying in the spot market right now is probably the least concerning. You are seeing bids now from the first quarter that are coming in 7%-to-10% higher, which serves as a good sign of things normalizing.” Looking ahead, Adamo said that the question remains in regards to if spot rates remain high enough to drag contract rates all the way up or are they likely to meet somewhere in the middle this summer, with DAT’s baseline contract rate forecast calling for contract rates to come in around 10%-to-12% higher annually. And while it may be too late to get more favorable terms, he explained it is not likely there will be a penalty for waiting one quarter, which is what is happening with shippers pushing bids out. “There is a higher probability it goes down a little bit rather than go up a little more,” he said. “They are sort of viewing it like they are going to wait it out and see if this rally peters out a little bit post-spring. But some of these big-box retailers have been running bids in the second quarter for decades—and for some of them to push this into the third quarter during the buildup to the retail shipping peak is a pretty big gamble on their part, both in terms of internal process and also where the market may be headed. A March 2026 rate snapshot from DAT, not in the DAT iQ report, found that March dry van, reefer, and flatbed rates came in at $1.99 (up 1.5% annually), $2.30 (flat annually) and $2.52 (down 1.6% annually), respectively, with spot rates, for the three modes, at $1.81 (up 13% annually), $2.19 (up 17.7% annually), and $2.23 (up 7.7% annually).