Logistics visibility specialist project44 has highlighted that container ships faced cumulative delays of more than 1,000 days following the Suez Canal incident late last month and that there is now more than 1.9 million TEU of capacity making their way to ports.
Logistics visibility specialist project44 has highlighted that container ships faced cumulative delays of more than 1,000 days following the Suez Canal incident late last month and that there is now more than 1.9 million TEU of capacity making their way to ports – “threatening to swamp ports with bottlenecked cargo for weeks to come”.
Warning shippers that “their headaches are not yet over”, the ocean freight tracking specialst has created a “global heat map” highlighting the ports that are expected to be most affected by the containership surge.
Based on ocean tracking data, project44 highlighted that “at major ports such as Singapore, more than 370,000 TEU of capacity are en route to the port, where 83 vessels representing 299,310 TEU were already at the port or anchored and waiting to unload as of April 12”.
It said the picture was similar at Rotterdam, “where 15 ships representing 196,600 TEU will arrive over the next week, lining up behind 85 ships already at port or waiting to enter the port”.
Other major ports bracing for the influx of volume are New York, with 76,500 TEU either having arrived or still inbound from the Suez Canal incident; Port Kelang, at 103,900 TEU; and Jebel Ali, at 75,879 TEU.
According to project44’s port delay tracking, the influx of ships will also exacerbate port delays measured in days, with delays on major trade routes like Shanghai-Rotterdam already close to the one-week mark – “a worrying increase over 2020, when median port delays on the same route were 2.79 days”.
Other routes where delays are on track to get worse include Shanghai-New York, where the median March delay was 8.05 days (up from 1.09 days in March 2020); Shenzhen-Hamburg, where median delays last month were 9.23 days (up from 3.52 days in March 2020); and Shenzen-Newark-Elisabeth, where median delays reached 12.92 in March (up from 0.29 days in March 2020), project44 highlighted
Project44 said its ongoing post-incident analysis aimed to provide maritime shipping industry stakeholders with “a clearer understanding of the incident, providing the analytical tools to create more robust supply chains in the future”.
Josh Brazil, VP for marketing at project44, commented: “The Suez Canal incident brings home the message that shippers must be prepared for unexpected disruptions in their supply chain. With real-time visibility and advanced alerting capabilities, disruptions as well as the ability to form strategies to avoid them, are more manageable than ever before.”
The information from project44 follows warnings from container lines and freight forwarders that although box traffic through the Suez Canal has more or less returned to normal two weeks since the channel was blocked by the Ever Given, the knock-on effects will last far longer.
Container shipping giant Maersk warned that customers should not expect a quick return to normal services. Lars Mikael Jensen, head of global ocean network at Maersk, said people should not be lulled into thinking that international shipping was functioning smoothly once again because the backlog of ships at the vital trade route had been cleared.
“Only afterwards the work really starts,” he said, referring to negotiations for berthing slots at ports and delayed ships missing their next scheduled voyage. He said the backlog was set to arrive in Europe or Asia “around the same time”, leading to congestion, with the knock-on effects on global supply chains were far from over.
“We will see ripple effects continuing into the second half of May,” he added.
The Suez Canal was blocked for six days at the end of last month after container ship, the Ever Given, ran aground and held up more than 400 ships at one of the world’s most important trade arteries. It took about a week for the queue of ships to pass through the canal, and even longer to clear a continuing tailback that caught up with those vessels while they waited to pass.
Maersk reopens short-term bookings
Maersk has reopened short-term cargo bookings from Asia after suspending them in the wake of the crisis. But it has asked customers to only send urgent goods and indicated that it would be dropping off some cargo at certain hub ports to be sent onwards to others, so vessels can avoid some key ports in Europe and Asia to get back on track after delays.
Container terminals are already stretched for space to store the boxes coming off the ships, with German shipping liner Hapag-Lloyd saying the situation in northern Europe is “critical”, particularly at ports such as Rotterdam and Southampton.
Some port authorities have started demanding shipping companies take a certain number of containers onboard if they want to anchor and offload their cargo, Jensen said.
“The best bet is we will see a normalisation in Europe around the second quarter – towards the back end of the quarter because of the Suez,” he said, with the US to follow later.
Source: Lloyd´s
