Chinese ports will close the year with positive container throughput growth compared to last year despite the Covid-19 outbreak and its effects.
In particular, from January to November 2020, the cargo volume of the ports in China was 241.7 million TEU, which is a 0.8% year-on-year increase. Container News understands that even a modest growth is an important achievement through this challenging year.
In terms of tonnes, there was an even greater increase, as the Chinese ports handled 13.249 billion tonnes, which translates to a 4.7% year-on-year boost.
All eight major ports in the country, except Dalian and Shanghai, have seen improved cargo volume figures in terms of TEU. The port of Tianjin in Northern China has presented the largest growth with a significant 6.1% increased box throughput.
On the other hand, Dalian suffered a massive decline of almost 40% in its container volumes, according to the ministry of transport of the People’s Republic of China. This was mainly due to the port’s focus on transforming its business model and because its profit does not rely on the container business, as Xiaowei Xu, container shipping industry researcher of Ningbo Shipping Exchange (NSE) explained to Container News.
In terms of container freight rates, the average value of the Ningbo Container Freight index (NCFI) in December was quoting 2007.5 points, which represents a considerable increase of 31.2% compared to last month.
NSE said that the delay in shipping schedules has been serious in the last month in the Ningbo-North America route due to the congestion at the San Pedro Bay port complex, Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. Hence, several services were forced to merge by carriers and the overall capacity was, therefore reduced, according to the NSE report.
The situation remains serious, according to Xiaowei Xu, who told Container News that shipping delays and congestion have become a regular occurrence on the trade.
At the end of the year, the tightness of space intensified and the market freight rate has been spiked. Particularly, the average freight rate from the Port of Ningbo to Los Angeles and New York ports in December was US$4,078 and US$5,045/FEU, respectively. These prices translate to 3.5% and 6.8% month-on-month increases.
