U.S. customs officials are poised to levy new duties on semitruck trailers made in China and Mexico after a year-long legal battle fought by Savannah’s Great Dane LLC and two other American manufacturers of this essential component of the trucking industry.
The decision marks a small victory for the American employers against an onslaught of cheaper, less safe Chinese trailers that are heavily subsidized by Beijing, according to Chris Hammond, the executive vice president of Great Dane and the great, great grandson of the 125-year-old company’s founder.
Great Dane has grown from a Savannah-based factory that helped the U.S. Army transport heavy equipment between the U.S. mainland and European battlefields in World War II to become one of the largest suppliers of refrigerated trailers in the nation. Its ten manufacturing facilities across the country, including a factory in Statesboro, supply retail companies such as Walmart, Home Depot and Amazon with the semitrailers they need to move products around the country.
Great Dane, along with Wabash National Corp. and Stoughton Trailers LLC, presented data to the U.S. International Trade Commission, an independent body, which the companies say shows that the market headwinds they have faced in recent years are due to an unfair playing field, rather than superior products or marketing.
Those three companies estimate that about 40% of the U.S. market for van trailers is supplied by China, Mexico and Canada combined. Import data suggests that foreign suppliers, mainly Chinese, have boosted their sales in America from about 48,000 van trailers annually between 2015-2017 to 80,600 between 2022 and 2024.
This competition is largely due to loopholes in trade law and a lack of enforcement by U.S. officials of current laws meant to prevent the industry’s mainly Chinese rivals from benefiting from state subsidies and exploitative wage practices, and has caused many other American trailer manufacturers out of business, said Hammond.
“Great Dane makes the safest and best products. We are doing our level best to support good jobs, good manufacturing jobs, for Georgians,” said Hammond. “All we are asking for is a level playing field.”
The American Trailer Manufacturers Coalition, the lobbying organization for these three companies, petitioned the U.S. government to support U.S. manufacturers in two ways.
One was to slap what are known as “countervailing duties” on foreign rivals, largely Chinese companies, to close the price gap between foreign-made semitrailers and U.S.-made trailers. The trade tool allows the U.S. government to offset foreign government subsidies or unfair wage competition.
After the ITC determined that the U.S. trailer manufacturers have been materially injured by imports, the Commerce Department last week instructed customs authorities to add duties ranging from 82.3% to 128.7% for trailers from China and 1.9% to 1.95% for trailers from Mexico.
In a second decision, the Department of Commerce set additional duties on specific Chinese companies intended to offset the amount by which a product is sold at less than fair value — or “dumped” — in America.. Those antidumping duties were set at 130% in a preliminary decision that is expected to be finalized later this summer.
Hammond said U.S. government action is a boon for his company and will enable Great Dane to hire more Americans and expand its output. But the decisions by the federal government are also important for national security considerations, he said, as a thriving U.S. trucking trailer industry is necessary for America’s economy. “I believe it’s the job of the government to help businesses” that have critical national security implications, he said.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://thecurrentga.org/2026/06/12/savannahs-great-dane-wins-chinese-tariff-battle/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://thecurrentga.org”>The Current</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/thecurrentga.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/cropped-TheCurrent_site-icon.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
<img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://thecurrentga.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=104127&ga4=G-L05EDNCRHK” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://thecurrentga.org/2026/06/12/savannahs-great-dane-wins-chinese-tariff-battle/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/thecurrentga.org/p.js”></script>
