Continual Craze of Marine Shipment

2021-01-12 18:23:51

According to Vincent Clerc, the head of the ocean transport division at Copenhagen-based Maersk, the peak of marine shipping cost may be seen in the first half of 2021, but it is also likely to be extended due to Covid (Bloomberg Markets).

We have witnessed the shipping costs from USD3000+ early this year for a 40HQ rising up to USD8000+ last week, which crazily drove up the prices of aluminum profiles for our clients in South America. There is still more, -- the price for the same container has risen over USD11000 from Asia to West Africa. Yet, the demands all over the world seem not affected since the orders also steadily increased from March on, when the lockdown in China was dismissed. We hope the craze can at least be alleviated after the long vacation of Chinese New Year, where the container lines have at least two weeks to ship more containers back to China.

To some extent, we really doubt the said efforts by these international shipping giants, since there are obviously much less exports from regions out of China, -- they are basically all locked down! There is high possibility that they ship more empty containers than full-load ones to China. Do they still have the motivation to sail out all the ships?