The Chinese government launched a new maritime transport route that will directly connect to Mexico. In January of this year, it cut the sailing time from 32 to 25 days and now reduces it to 22 days, according to local press reports in Mexico.
On Friday, July 22, the state shipping company China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), one of the five largest container shipping companies in the world, set sail the container ship OOCL Chennai from the Dalian seaport, in the northeast of the Asian country, bound for Mexico in a direct connection, reported the Mexican newspaper El Sol de Chiapas, citing the Xinhua news agency. It will be a direct weekly service to the Mexican seaports; Ensenada, Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas, all on the Mexican Pacific coast.
The shipping company plans to have eight cargo ships with a capacity of between 6,000 and 8,000 twenty-foot containers (TEU).
Mexico's total international trade with China grew at 20.8 percent in average annual growth rate (AAGR) between 1993 and 2023. That AAGR is almost three times the AAGR of 7.4 percent that Mexico registered with the United States in the same period.
In 2023, Mexico's trade flow with the United States was $745.6 billion and with China $124.2 billion. With the United States, in 2023 Mexico registered a trade surplus of $234.7 billion and with China a trade deficit of $104.1 billion was recorded.
In terms of steel, China is Mexico's fourth largest trading partner. In the first five months of 2024, it sold 522,000 metric tons (mt) to Mexico. That volume represented 9.8 percent of all steel imports.
China is surpassed in steel imports to Mexico by 14.6 percent from Japan, 15.3 percent from South Korea and 31.3 percent from the United States. In steel exports, Mexico does not sell anything to China.
Mexico's foreign trade with China will change because this month, the United States and Mexico announced new tariff measures to combat the circumvention of US tariffs on steel and aluminum from China and other countries that use Mexico as a springboard to export their products to the United States.
The United States and Mexico decided to apply a 25 percent tariff on steel not “melted and poured” in the USMCA region.