RSI Television News interview with the president of the Tepoorten Group, Marco Oliver Tepoorten, broadcast on 3 April 2025. At Franzosini's operational headquarters, between active terminals and real-time tracking, two containers are on their way to the United States: one bound for the port of New York, the other destined for Houston.
Customs paperwork has already been submitted, but a sudden change threatens to upset everything: the introduction of a 31% tariff on Swiss goods by the US administration. An announced measure, yet a bitter one for those working in daily logistics. No operational notice, no gradual adjustment. Just a unilateral decision that risks inflating costs and uncertainties, hitting not only large exporters but also the many Swiss SMEs that entrust their shipments to Atlantic ports.
The impact is immediate. At Franzosini, a company active for over a century with 70 employees and CHF 35 million in turnover, the effect is tangible. US-bound traffic does not represent the main share — around CHF 1.5 million per year — but it is strategic for clients in the industrial, medical and fashion sectors. Today those clients are calling, wanting answers.
'We have containers that left while the regulations were changing. They will arrive in a different America from the one they were expected in,' comments Marco Oliver Tepoorten. 'This is the kind of situation where every hour counts, and where knowing where the goods are is no longer enough: you need to know where international trade policy stands.'
The problem, however, runs deeper. Switzerland no longer has tools to negotiate, not on this ground. Since 1 January 2024, it has eliminated almost all tariffs on industrial imports. A choice that made domestic sense — easing costs for businesses — but that today proves to be a diplomatic boomerang.
'We no longer have tariffs to offer in exchange. We no longer even have enough trained customs personnel,' observes Tepoorten. He says it with realism, not polemic. In a country where digitalisation has replaced experience, and customs training has taken a back seat, the return to complex tariff regimes finds the Swiss system unprepared.
The feeling among operators is that a new front is opening. After years of globalised trade, facilitated by agreements, digital procedures and advanced traceability, the conversation is returning to tariffs, barriers, economic sovereignty. To trade wars.
'The tariff war is only one of the wars of our time. Alongside the cyber war, the geopolitical war, the actual war. But this too is a war. And we need to understand how to face it,' reflects Tepoorten.
The unilateral imposition by the United States brings back into the spotlight a profession often overlooked: the customs freight forwarder. A role that in recent years has had to reinvent itself amid software, reforms and algorithms, but that today is once again central. Because when regulations change during a container's crossing, it is not an algorithm that explains what is happening. It is someone with experience, vision and connections.
At Franzosini, this expertise still exists. But elsewhere, at smaller border crossings, in smaller companies, it is beginning to disappear. Italy, with its layered but still staffed customs system, watches. The European Union buys time. Switzerland, meanwhile, risks paying the bill for years spent dismantling its customs expertise in the name of simplification.
The immediate effect will be higher export costs to the USA. But the medium-term effect could be more insidious: loss of competitiveness, loss of control over supply chains, loss of credibility. In the era of smart logistics and promises of simplification, reality returns to speak the language of risk. And as always, those who know how to navigate the border — not just the physical one, but the regulatory one — have a few more cards to play.