Lisa Butland
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Exports from the Port of Los Angeles, the busiest U.S. ocean trade gateway, fell 8% in January to the lowest monthly output in nearly three years, Executive Director Gene Seroka said on Tuesday.
“Exports to China are looking bleak,” Seroka said after the Port of Los Angeles handled 104,297 loaded export containers of 20-foot equivalent units (TEU) in January.
President Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs has upended global trade, and retaliatory trade tariffs from China and others have hit U.S. exporters like farmers particularly hard.
Seroka said soybean shipments from the Port of Los Angeles to China fell 80% last year, adding that trade conditions did not improve in November or December following discussions between representatives of the two countries on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit.
“The U.S. is not exporting a lot to China today,” said trade expert Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for Economic Research, adding that exports of commodities ranging from beef and corn to crude oil and coal also declined in 2025.
Imports into the closely watched Port of Los Angeles in January were 421,594 TEU, down 13% from last year’s unusually strong results, Seroka said.
So far, import volumes in February have been relatively flat compared with the same period last year. Imports will slow in March as Chinese factories close for the Lunar New Year holiday, he said.
Still, Seroka expects total port throughput to be down less than 10% in the first quarter from the same period last year, when U.S. importers rushed to ship goods ahead of President Donald Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on countries such as China.
“I don’t think there will be a sharp decline in the economy or freight volumes after this, and while holiday sales were softer than we expected, I don’t think the situation is severe,” Seroka said, referring to sluggish U.S. retail sales in December, which suggests a possible weakness in consumer spending, which accounts for about 70% of U.S. economic activity.
(Reporting by Lisa Beltran; Editing by Chris Reese and Nick Ziminski)
