Container trades out of India are faced with increasing congestion, due to a combination of blanked sailings, equipment shortages and carriers unable to clear a backlog of bookings.
According to forwarding sources in the country, every carrier is facing a “space crunch across India on all trade lanes and services”.
Sources added that this was largely due to blanked sailings on almost every tradelane, container shut-outs and rollovers “on every vessel”, an ever-lengthening list of bookings due to cancelled sailings, growing congestion at transhipment facilities “due to shortage of manpower and voided vessels and limited vessel berthing windows, also due to “manpower shortage and other operational issues”.
Source: The Loadstar
More evidence has emerged on how differently the three main container shipping alliances on the Asia-North Europe trade are to manage capacity for the remainder of the year.
According to new data from SeaIntelligence today, the 2M and Ocean alliances had been quick off the mark early in the year to make drastic capacity cuts in weeks five and six. The 2M partners reduced capacity by over 50%, compared with that week in 2019, while the Ocean Alliance reduced capacity by around 45%, year on year.
Source: The Loadstar
The loaded import volume at the Port of Los Angeles declined 6.8% year over year (YoY) in June, and loaded exports fell more than 21%, according to numbers released by the port Wednesday. Loaded imports at the Port of Long Beach declined more than 9% YoY in June, and exports fell 12%.
The Port of Los Angeles has begun to see retailers restocking omnichannel inventory and canceled sailings are beginning to slow, Executive Director Gene Seroka said Wednesday during a press event.
Source: Supply Chain Dive
A fire onboard an Ethiopian Airlines 777 freighter at Shanghai Pudong this morning has again triggered questions on the safety of lithium batteries and cargo mis-declaration.
As yet, there is no information on how the blaze began, but 100% cargo screening in Shanghai could make it easier to determine the cause.
One source with boots on the ground at the airport told The Loadstar there were three pallets of lithium batteries listed on the manifest, for loading in China for export.
Source: The Loadstar
Although now nearly a quarter of the world’s containership fleet by capacity is fitted with exhaust gas cleaning scrubber technology, new retrofit orders for the technology are “almost zero”, according to a leading manufacturer.
During a Q2 results presentation last Friday, Wartsila CEO Jaako Eskola said: “Today the fuel [price] spread between high-sulphur and low-sulphur fuel is so low that the retrofitting order intake in scrubbers is pretty much almost zero.”
Meanwhile, Alphaliner reported that, to date, scrubber retrofitting on 465 containerships had been completed.
Source: The Loadstar
February’s coronavirus shutdown in Wuhan, China hit American food exports hard. Shippers transport perishable food in refrigerated containers called “reefers.” When unloaded, they must connect to electric power via “reefer plugs.” Reefer plugs at China ports filled up after the Wuhan outbreak.
Now, it’s happening again.
Reefer-plug capacity maxed out in February because China severely restricted trucking in the wake of the outbreak as ships continued to arrive and unload new reefers.
Source: Freight Waves
