120 Ports Around The World Are Congested And 360 Ships Are Ready To Berth
Asia shipped about 10.037 million 20-foot containers to the US, up 40% from a year earlier and the highest in nearly 17 years, as the shipping season got under way. As of August 2ed, 120 ports around the world had reported congestion, with 360 ships waiting to dock at ports around the world.
1.The United States has 80 container ships waiting to berth
Ports on both sides of the US coast were on edge, with delays at the ports of Long Beach, California, Los Angeles and Oakland, where 80 container ships were waiting to berth. Shipments from China are delayed 15 to 20 days after arriving at US ports, and as many as a quarter of intermodal containers are unusable because some are being used for temporary storage.
2.All the major ports of Europe have been lost
After Rotterdam, Hamburg, Felixstowe and Le Havre, Antwerp has now become the latest Northern European port to suffer from a chain reaction of congestion, with waiting times for ships to dock extended to five days. Several shipping companies have announced port jumps.
3.More than 40,000 teus piled up in Chittagong for nearly two weeks
Chittagong is facing the worst situation in its history, with more than 40,000 teus stacked in the dock for nearly two weeks and more than 20 ships sitting in the port area for more than a week.
Pressure has been building in Chittagong since Eid al-Fitr, with factories and warehouses across the country closed due to blockages since July 20, hindering the delivery of boxes from port yards.
Today, about 42,029 TEUs are at the port terminal and 56,760 teus are outside the terminal, approaching the storage capacity of the yard.
4.The Vietnamese port of Gilai was forced to suspend some operations
From August 1, the Cat Lai Port will begin to handle transhipment boxes and transhipment cargo to other ports, and from August 5, the docking, unloading and transportation of extra long, overweight, oversized and overloaded cargo will also be suspended at the port until further notice. If the container yard in the port is not filled with import and export goods, the port will be completely shut down and lie flat.
5.How long will port congestion and soaring freight rates last?
In 2020, the order of container turnover is unbalanced, experiencing three stages of restricted empty container return, imbalance of import and export, and worsening of the problem of lack of containers, which significantly reduces the effective supply. The supply and demand of containers will be tightened progressively, the spot freight price will rise sharply, the demand in Europe and the United States will continue, and the high freight price will continue until the third quarter of 2021.
Shipping market also has a cycle, generally 3-5 years a cycle. Both ends of shipping supply and demand are highly cyclical, and a strong recovery on the demand side usually leads to a growth cycle on the supply side in 2-3 years.
"Container freight rates are expected to continue to rise until the end of this year and then decline in the first quarter of next year, so container freight rates will still hover at multi-year highs," Huang Baoying, global managing editor of S&P Global Platts container shipping, said in a recent interview with CCTV.
With the popularization of vaccination, congestion at domestic and foreign ports is expected to continue to ease in the second half of the year, effective container transportation capacity will increase, the backlog of goods is expected to complete the shipment, container throughput and container transportation volume are expected to continue to grow.
