Copenhagen-based container analysis firm Sea-Intelligence has warned liners to brace for “peak pandemic impact” over the next month, starting today.
The coming five weeks see the largest amount of capacity blanked on the main trade lanes, something that was flagged up earlier in the month by Rodolphe Saade, the head of French containerline CMA CGM. For Asia to the east coast of South America, Sea-Intelligence has tallied as much as 59% capacity removal.
As of yesterday, Sea-Intelligence has tracked 456 blank sailings as a consequence of the pandemic. For the Asia-Europe and transpacific trades alone, the amount of removed weekly carrying capacity increased by 300,000 teu last week to 3.4m teu.
Sea-Intelligence also warned in its latest Sunday Spotlight report that due to the multitude of blank sailings, liner shipping is now entering into a period where the export of full and empty containers from Europe to Asia will in certain weeks exceed the carrying capacity. Transpacific backhaul capacity is also tightening, but not to the same extent as Europe-Asia.
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”…..has warned liners to brace for peak pandemic impact….”
– Do liners really need to be warned of the effects of the pandemic in the coming weeks when they have already been dealing with nothing else for the past month and a half?
Surely the major container shipping companies of the world have already figured out what is going on, what steps they need to take to deal with it and that there is still more of the same coming down the line, without being warned by a consultant?
Martyn – Sea-Intelligence is tracking and measuring the extent the of the blank sailings, and provide the data showing what is going on. Whether someone wants to interpret this as a warning cannot be ascribed to Sea-Intelligence and they in this context “merely” provide the actual data.