February figures<\/a>, just released by the Los Angeles and Long Beach port authorities.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
At Los Angeles, the largest box port in North America, imports plummeted 22.5% last month, compared with February 2019, to 270,025 teu, while exports declined by 5.7%, to 134,468 teu. Empty container movements slumped by 35% to 139,544 teu.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At neighbouring Long Beach, imports dropped by 17.9%, to 248,592 teu, although exports were actually ahead by 19.3%, to 125,559 teu, and empty containers were down 12.8% to 164,277 teu.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
However, executive director for the port of Long Beach Mario Cordero was optimistic about recovery.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce the virus is contained, we may see a surge of cargo, and our terminals, labour and supply chain will be ready to handle it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
However, notwithstanding hopes of a \u201cv-shaped\u201d bounce-back among ports and carriers, one leading liner analyst is warning that the industry is facing a contraction in global container volumes not seen since the financial crash of 2008.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Via his\u00a0Linked-In<\/em>\u00a0platform, SeaIntelligence Consulting\u2019s Lars Jensen warned that with the pandemic rapidly escalating in Europe and the US, the shutdown of non-essential public workplaces, events and leisure activities would see import demand drop sharply.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cHence the expectation of a surge out of China to make up for the earlier shortfall will be postponed,\u201d said Mr Jensen.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He added that if the virus crisis played out in a similar fashion to the financial crash, when consumers and businesses suddenly reigned-in their spending, it could result in a 10% contraction in container volumes, equalling a shrinking of some 17m teu globally for container lines and a loss of around 80m teu for container ports and terminals.<\/p>\n
gCaptain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There have been reports of severe equipment shortages in the US and Europe as a consequence of carriers blanking around half of all headhaul sailings since Chinese New Year, due to the Covid-19 virus outbreak. Alphaliner said MSC was redeploying the 23,756 teu\u00a0MSC Mia\u00a0to the transpacific leg of the 2M\u2019s North Europe-Asia-USWC, combined AE1\/Shogun-TP-6\/Pearl, loop, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[2479,3210,301,3209,218,1225,3208,72],"class_list":["post-6156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marine-world","tag-biggest","tag-boxes","tag-containerships","tag-empty","tag-msc","tag-pick","tag-sending","tag-worlds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/6157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}