Transhipment, the transhipment activity in ports that consists of transferring cargo from one ship to another in its journey to the final destination and which was born from the need of the largest shipping companies concentrate large quantities of transported containers on a few major shipping routes from large-capacity vessels, to exploiting economies of scale, has now come into the crosshairs of the White House denouncing the use of a form of transshipment which is deemed illegal. If transhipment as an operation purely logistical is "legitimate", the federal administration led by Donald Trump denounces a use of unlawful of this practice consisting of minimal or of goods in an intermediate port/country of the route in order to artificially change the country of origin declared, to evade duties or avoid incurring restrictions commercial activities.

A new report from the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy titled "The Great Transshipment Scam", which has been published in recent days, there goes - as you can he says - down heavy denouncing the presence of a net of more than 40 nations that would be used to circumvent tariffs on Chinese goods, which after the introduction of tariffs are processed, relabeled or simply re-exported through third countries. According to the Office of the House Bianca, which was created during the first term of office at the Trump presidency with the task of providing the president with analysis and advice on commercial and industrial policies, this network renamed "Shadow Transshipment Network", would be used by Chinese exporters to route goods to the United States via third countries, The aim is to evade the duties imposed on Beijing.

For the authors of the report, "the genesis of this scam dates back to 2018, when President Trump imposed tariffs Section 301 customs clearance to combat customs practices unfair trade of China, the forced transfer of intellectual property theft and the mercantilism directed by the State". According to the report, That measure would have effectively reduced the trade deficit China, but would also have pushed many exporters to divert shipments through countries with higher rates by resorting to practices such as relabelling, repackaging, false declarations of origin and minimum façade workmanship, sufficient to make the goods appear as without constituting a real substantial transformation. This phenomenon, which the document defines as "Great Reallocation", would gradually give life from a structured ecosystem of production hubs, logistics platforms, free zones and re-export centers scattered all over the world. The report highlights that after the introduction of tariffs in 2018 under Section 301, China's share of the American imports have started to decline, while that of a group of third countries has grown in parallel.

According to the report, there would be over 40 participating nations to the Shadow Transshipment Network on the basis of three levels: the of the "Diversified Scale Leaders" made up of large China's trading partners, which while maintaining industrial bases diversified and important export platforms to the USA, including Canada, European Union, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan, where illegal transshipment would be present in the context of trade flows largely legitimate. The second level would be made up of countries with strong economic integration with China, including Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam, described as platforms manufacturing and logistics sectors deeply linked to the Chinese supply. In the third level they would fall from "small opportunistic Chinese objectives", i.e. a group more large number of smaller economies (including Cambodia, Panama, Costa Rica, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Morocco and Kazakhstan) which would offer specific advantages such as cheap labour, Strategic port access or customs controls less rigorous.

One of the central aspects of the report is the attempt to quantify the phenomenon that, by cross-referencing five independent sources - two governmental bodies (the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Trade and Economic Analysis of the Department of Commerce) and three private companies (Goldman Sachs, Exiger and Altana), it is believed to be included in between 40 billion (Goldman Sachs) and 303 billion (Altana) dollars per year.

In addition to the lost tax revenues, the report estimates wider economic consequences. In the central scenario of $75 billion of illegal transshipment per year (estimated Exiger), the report estimates the loss of about 450,000 jobs a reduction in annual gross domestic product of between $113 and $150 billion and federal revenue losses between $19 billion and $26 billion. In the scenario of maximum exposure, based on Altana's estimate, the figures they would rise to over 1.8 million jobs and over 450 billion dollars of GDP lost.

To stem this phenomenon, the report proposes the creation of a "Border Detective", a customs control system AI-powered software designed to integrate data from shipping, routing histories, customs classifications, analysis of corporate ownership relationships and tools anomaly detection, including recognition computerized images in containers. The declared goal is to distinguish legitimate investments and nearshoring genuine from the fictitious trade aimed only at changing the origin of the goods.

As mentioned, the report does not hide the fact that, by creating a forest of Different tariffs by country, the same Trump administration may have given impetus to further diversification of the global production and supply network, and is evidently plausible to say that this was the effect. "In 2025," the document specifies, "the Trump administration has increased tariffs compared to a number of countries, with some of these countries have faced higher rates than others. These differentials, in themselves, can increase the incentive for illegal transhipment. At the same time - underlines the report - the Trump administration has taken steps significant to prevent and discourage transhipment".

Among these, the report recalls that last June the President Trump signed Executive Order 14411 with the purpose of strengthening transparency obligations for importers, increasing financial security requirements and introducing new disclosure obligations on the ownership of companies importers, but acknowledges that, however, "it is too much to determine the net effect of tariff policies and anti-transhipment of the administration", since the data commercial and customs services become available only with a certain delay and various provisions of the Executive Order still need to be be fully implemented.