The container shortage will prevail until after Chinese New Year 2021

With the continuous container shortage situation in China and unexpected demand for delivery by sea, pls. pay your special attention on shipment issue before CNY holiday. The shortage will prevail until after Chinese New Year 2021.

In particular, 40 feet containers are the most in short supply in the market now. At present, the shortage of containers in the Asian shipping market is particularly serious, especially in China.

Trition, the world's largest container leasing company, believes that the shortage of container equipment will continue into next year. San Francisco-based Textainer, the world's second-largest container leasing company, providing container leasing services for more than four hundred shipping companies around the world, also holds the same view, According to Philippe Wendling, Textainer's senior vice president of marketing, the container supply and demand situation is unlikely to return to equilibrium in the short term, and this will continue for four months, and is expected to last until February 2021.

Why is there such a shortage of containers? 

1、What is the cause of the severe shortage of containers? Insiders pointed out that since the outbreak of the epidemic,  the world blockade measures resulting in a sharp decrease in global demand for the transport of goods. To this end, Chinese and foreign shipping companies have suspended routes, reduce the number of export container voyages, and significantly dismantle the idle container ships. In the last six months, the container in the global distribution is seriously uneven. Such as the world's 12 container shipping companies have 11 cut capacity, reduce the number of fleets; there are many small and medium-sized shipping companies because they can not afford the economic pressure caused by the long-term suspension, has been successively closed down.

2、 The epidemic overseas market has not yet fully recovered, unable to resume work and production, the recent increase in China's exports of container volume, but China's imports from abroad to reduce the volume of containers, the cargo volume of the going route is much higher than the return route. Shipping companies, in order to avoid empty load, use smaller ships to perform the return route, or multiple liner companies share a ship to ship, resulting in the continued reduction of empty containers returned to China. For both reasons, containers are in particularly short supply at domestic ports.

Under this actual situation, we face strict test. For most of the orders running from Aug., shipping space was difficult to get. Even when receipt of SO, in some case we cannot actually load because nowhere to find a container. Some cargo containers were lifted and held at port due to vessel spaces over-sold.

Coming Nov., it will become worse. Near CNY becomes worse. Generally, our shipping colleague book vessel 4 weeks before ETD, now they change to book 6-8weeks earlier. Now, also some big group start to make vessel reservation with their forwarder for Dec ~ Jan. shipment.

By this news, we would like to remind all customers and friends that the shortage of containers is not expected to disappear in the short term. Everyone arranges shipments reasonably and informs us in advance to arrange booking!And you may use your buying power to push your forwarder and release container to us in time. Thank you for your attention.