The shortage of containers pushes up sea freight rates, and Chinese foreign trade companies are deeply troubled

Nowadays, the global shipping industry can be described as "two days of ice and fire". The epidemic situation in many overseas countries is severe, labor is insufficient, and the port containers are piled up. The major ports in Asia are busy with transportation, but they are often plagued by "lack of containers" and "few containers", and the price of containers has skyrocketed. The shipping route has risen nearly 10 times, and it is still "hard to find a box".

Domestic ports are "thirsty for boxes" and foreign trade companies are "hard to find a box"

For some time, in many domestic ports, there have always been people waiting around the container registry.

Since the third quarter of last year, the phenomenon of lack of containers and fewer containers has spread in major ports. According to many media reports, some scalpers took the opportunity to sit on the ground and raise prices, and some routes may not be able to grab a container even if they increase the price by US$3,000. There are also a large number of production enterprises that are troubled by the lack of boxes. The warehouse of a handicraft manufacturer in Ningbo is full of products that have not yet been shipped, with a total volume of 1,000 cubic meters.

The anxiety of enterprises has continuously pushed up the sales price of containers. In the first half of 2020, the price of a 20-foot box was $1,600, and now it has risen to a maximum of $3,600, while the price of the popular 40-foot box has risen to $5,950, all doubling the price and hitting an all-time high.

Different from the domestic "one box is hard to find", the Port of Auckland in New Zealand has a serious backlog of empty containers. Since the second half of 2020, in order to store those empty containers that cannot be transported, they have successively found 5 new storage yards. Nearly 6,000 empty containers are stranded in Auckland.

The data shows that 10,000 to 15,000 containers are stranded in California, USA. In the Port of Felixstowe, England, containers have spread from the port to the surrounding suburbs. The number of empty containers in Australian ports exceeded 50,000. Currently, the stockpiles of empty containers in some important international ports are three times the normal level.

Global economic recovery, Chinese manufacturing boosts shipping demand

This wave of price hikes in the shipping industry is affected by multiple factors, such as the severe overseas epidemic and the blockage of the Suez Canal, which have doubled the pressure on the shipping industry.

With the recovery of the global economy, the trade demand of various countries has increased greatly. Due to the effective control of the epidemic in China, China's manufacturing industry has assumed an important responsibility in the global industrial chain. Data show that in the first four months of this year, the total import and export value of China's trade goods increased by 28.5% compared with the same period in 2020, and increased by 21.8% compared with the same period in 2019.