The full impact of the US removing import duty exemptions for e-commerce shipments may take a year to reach consumers, similar to the timeline seen after the UK’s exit from the European Union, according to the CEO of DHL Express.
Consumers had yet to fully realise the additional costs they might have to bear, said John Pearson.
“When Brexit happened, I was receiving calls from customers even one year later, saying the duties charged on their orders must have been incorrect,” he told the Post in an interview in Johannesburg, one of the many hubs the German door-to-door courier operates in Africa, a key growth market. DHL Express is a division of the Bonn-based global logistics giant DHL Group.
“We would be naive to think, in a month, we would know everything about [the impact], because customers are only starting to realise the little trinkets they bought were charged certain duties because of, for example, their metal content.”
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