Eight months ago, right after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in Baltimore, “Marketplace’s” Amy Scott spoke with Sue Monaghan, president and CEO of Baltimore International Warehousing and Transportation. At the time, Monaghan shared stories about laying off drivers and trying to make ends meet.
While the port is back to 85% of its typical vessel traffic, the October port strike in October and potential tariffs on the horizon mean business hasn’t quite returned to normal.
Scott called up Monaghan again to chat about where things stand for the business now. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Amy Scott: We last talked in July when the Port of Baltimore was just opening back up. And, at the time, you said business felt “touchy.” How has it been since then?
Sue Monaghan: Well, it’s definitely picked up in November, but it still was pretty spotty through August and September. A lot of the business didn’t return right away. We still had cargo coming into Norfolk, Virginia, so we kind of lost that transportation piece of the business that we would have had out of Baltimore.
Scott: And then there was that three-day port strike that affected Baltimore. How did that affect your business?
Monaghan: That affected our business. It really shut down the port for a week. And then, because the vessels were delayed, we didn’t have everything coming in for a couple weeks, so we were really slow a couple weeks after that, and I think that had to do with vessel scheduling.
Scott: Is this a busy time for you, or is the holiday rush already over?
Monaghan: Because we have so many different kinds of products that we store, we experience it differently. We don’t always handle a lot of retail, but we suspect that we might have a lot more cargo coming in to try and beat a potential strike for January, because they haven’t settled the negotiations yet.
Scott: Right, it was a tentative deal, so you could be facing that all over again.
Monaghan: Yes.
Scott: And how do you gear up for something like that?
Monaghan: Well, we do have someone that’s handling business development, and so we are looking to diversify so that not everything is coming from the port, so that we can handle deliveries that are coming, you know, [from] a direct customer to another customer instead of port to customer, port to warehouse. So we have been successful, you know, picking up some cargo that way.
Scott: What are you hearing from your clients as they return to Baltimore and start using your port again? Have things gotten somewhat back to normal since the bridge collapsed?
Monaghan: I would say that they have. I think that, you know, most of the clients are happy to be back in Baltimore. We did lose a small amount of business to New York and Norfolk, where people were able to make some kind of concession that made it more attractive for them to move through those ports. It wasn’t significant, but it was there.
Scott: And some of those customers have stayed with those ports?
Monaghan: Yes.
Scott: How do you win them back? Do you have a pitch that you give?
Monaghan: It’s pretty much time. If they can get the same service, a lot of people are really driven by pricing right now. So it’s cheaper to go into New York and Norfolk ocean freight-wise. But we are inland, so the inland freight is less expensive. So it depends on where exactly those customers are going from.
Scott: As you know, the incoming Trump administration has promised to raise tariffs on many imports. Does that worry you at all in terms of the potential impact on the customers that you serve?
Monaghan: We suspect that people will try to bring in cargo prior to any tariffs that could go into effect. So that might be another driver. It might have an increase in traffic coming into any port, actually.
Scott: So you might see an initial boost?
Monaghan: Yes, I suspect it’ll be somewhat like COVID was, that everybody was bringing in a lot of product, and then it’ll fall off again as there’s some level of, if you can call it, normalizing, after that.
Scott: Were there lessons that you learned as a business owner from all this and the recovery?
Monaghan: We didn’t give up. We just shifted and did what we needed to do to keep the drivers running, to keep the warehouses operating, and we did. We were successful.
