At 11am In California last Thursday, on the day President Donald Trump declared sweeping new invoices under what he called “Release Day”, Ryan Petersen was alive on camera, with questions from a virtual room full of more than 2,300 restless customers. Its founder and chief executive BendingA 12 -year -old world Logistics and Customs Stock Exchange Company now had spent the night before studying himself in the thin print, preparing to explain a gloomy new reality for us importers.
“We broke our platform,” Petersen said, he said half that night at TechCrunch’s Strictlyvc in San Francisco. “We need to get a better.”
In less than 24 hours, the world of world trade has turned upside down – and it remains. Cumulative invoices up to 79% will soon be applied to a range of products from China, including sofas. Immediate consumption models, protected by the DE minimis threshold without consumer, are now subject to new customs obligations. Meanwhile, US ports support a proposed rule that could hit ocean bodies with up to $ 1.5 million per port call if their ships are made in China – or even if they have one by order.
“It’s scary for our customers,” Petersen told the event. “For some of these companies. For many of our customers. [the spate of changes] It will be an existential type of life and death decisions. ”
Flexport, one of the largest customs brokerage companies in the US, had no choice but to speed up quickly. Petersen had already spoken to 200 customers personally earlier a year, many of them were largely supported by Vietnam for production, believing that they had differentiated away from China in time.
But Petersen said he was not surprised by the fact that Vietnam was hit with an invoice of 46%. “I expected to have duties almost everywhere, and that’s what we saw.”
The real surprise, he noted, was the few unnoticed announcement that the US would close the De Minimis program for imports worldwide-not just for China. Change affects the business models of e -commerce giants such as TEMU and Shein, as well as the thousands of shops based on Shopify that handle the fulfillment from nearby Mexico.
“Over 30% of all e-commerce trademarks-large-have created their fulfillment in Mexico,” Petersen explained. “So all this goes away. Or at least the aspect without duties.”
Petersen-one loyal to the so-called Founder Who talks to up to 50 employees a day – he didn’t expect to start the word. “I had to go dig and try to understand these things,” he told the audience. “And then, when we started feeling as if I had understood, I wrote a blog post about de minimis. I had hedge fund texts. We were [also] the first to notice that semiconductors were carved. I had one of Nvidia’s biggest investors saying, “Where do you see this?” I am like, “that [says it in the new law].
It is not surprising that what Flexport tried to offer shortly after the new Trump prices war was not just guidance for the logistics, as Petersen explained. Were stability. Flexport officials were definitely needed. “The rule one in a crisis is that everyone will rally around the quietest person in the room,” Petersen said. “You know. You’re a company’s leader
The coolest heads are something that FlexPort customers need at the moment. With invoice tables, customs rules and shipping costs all in flow, customers turn to FlexPort to understand what it feels like full chaos.
And even more slow breaks. A pending proposal from the US Commercial Representative threatens to impose amazing port fees on Chinese ships and even ships belonging to carriers with Chinese boats in their fleet.
“They say they will put in a fee … if the ship is built in China, I think it’s a million dollars … a million and a half every time they come to the United States,” Petersen said.
The goal, according to the administration, is to stimulate the American shipbuilding. The potential result, in Petersen’s view, is the most widespread cost that has been transferred to us importers and many seafarers who lose their jobs as ships are looking for minimizing the number of attitudes.
Despite the chaos, Petersen is not ready to call it the end of free trade. “Most likely, this is not permanent,” he said. “I talked to one of the members of the cabinet … who told me that the release day would be the beginning and not the end of the process.”
He said he was encouraged that some countries responded, even in front of Trump’s maneuvering. “Vietnam and Israel came to the table and eliminated all the tasks for American goods this week,” Petersen noted.
This can offer a forward path: quiet negotiations, reciprocal agreements and a reformed global supply chain. Meanwhile, Petersen and his team are on their feet, answering phones, tweeting up to a storm and breaking webinar platforms to keep the supply chain moving in the vagina.
You can see this complete interview – Petersen also talks about AI and why he hugged the founder’s operation – below.
