The Christmas peak season has been preceded by port congestion, and container shipping rates have hit a new high. On September 10, the Shanghai Export Container Index (SCFI) released by the Shanghai Shipping Exchange rose to 4568.16 points, setting a new record high again. Compared with the lowest point of 820 points last year, the increase was as high as 457%.
Trans-Pacific eastbound route capacity is still tight compared to peak season demand , shippers and importers are scrambling to purchase priority shipping services to ship goods as quickly as possible. But labor shortages, extreme congestion and pandemic-related disruptions are expected to put more pressure on capacity into the year ahead. Space and equipment shortages on Asia-Europe routes continue. Market demand exceeds supply, and freight rates continue to rise. The suspension of sailings and insufficient supplies of equipment have made the situation worse. Various carriers are overbooked, have begun to limit the acceptance of bookings, or arrange to dump cargo, and the reliability of shipping schedules is also low. As of this week, the latest Freightos Baltic Index shows:
The freight rate from Asia to the West Coast increased by 8% from last week to US$20,586/FEU, compared with More than six times higher than a year ago;
The freight rate from Asia to the East Coast of the United States increased 8% from last week and 4.5 times from a year ago to $22,173/FEU.
The freight rate from Asia to Northern Europe increased by 3% from last week, which is more than eight times that of a year ago and more than 2.5 times that of the beginning of the year, reaching US$14,221/FEU.
The Asia-Mediterranean freight rate climbed 2% from last week to $13,231/FEU.
Under the situation of shortage of containers and ships, “scalpers” who “speculate and dump containers” have also become active in the container shipping market . “International shipping prices are now ridiculously high. On the one hand, it is indeed due to the imbalance between supply and demand of shipping capacity and space. Another part of the reason is that scalpers are taking advantage of the chaos in the market to speculate on boxes. Sometimes a box needs to go through three hands before it can be obtained. “A Shanghai freight forwarder said. The container market is huge and the process is sophisticated. In addition to shipping companies and shipowners owning some of their own containers, container leasing companies of all sizes hold a larger portion of the containers. According to a freight forwarder, after these first-generation scalpers obtained a large number of containers, they resold them to the second-generation scalpers, and their peers continued to raise prices after repeated turnovers, so that the business of reselling boxes later became better than directly working as a freight forwarder.
The industry is in chaos: now it is a deformed shipping market where you can earn a ship with just one trip, it is hard to find a cabin, the freight is comparable to the value of the goods, and the foreign trade production of low-value products Enterprises have been forced to the red line of survival; recently, Yiwu freight forwarders and cargo owners have joined forces to charter a ship to open the “Ningbo-Los Angeles” direct route. It is not surprising that the cargo owners have been forced to become ship owners. And the shipping company also made a lot of money.
Summary of the performance of the nine major shipping companies in the first half of this year
Maersk: operating income was US$26.6 billion and net profit was US$6.5 billion. It is expected that the full-year profit will exceed the sum of the past seven years;
CMA CGM: operating income was US$22.48 billion and net profit reached US$5.55 billion, a year-on-year increase of 29 times;
Hapag-Lloyd: Operating income was US$10.6 billion, net profit was US$3.3 billion, an increase of more than 9.5 times year-on-year;
HMM: operating income was US$4.56 billion and net profit was US$310 million. It lost approximately US$32.05 million in the same period last year and turned a profit;
Evergreen Shipping: operating income was 68.3 billion US dollars, net profit was US$2.81 billion, a year-on-year increase of more than 27 times;
Wanhai Shipping: operating income was NT$86.633 billion (approximately US$3.11 billion), Net profit after tax was NT$33.687 billion (approximately US$1.21 billion), a year-on-year increase of 18 times;
Yang Ming Shipping: operating income was NT$135.55 billion, Approximately 4.87 billion U.S. dollars, net profit was NT$59.05 billion, approximately 2.12 billion U.S. dollars, a year-on-year increase of more than 32 times;
Zim Lines: operating income was 4.13 billion U.S. dollars , net profit was US$1.48 billion, a year-on-year increase of nearly 113 times.
With the huge profits, everyone wants to get a piece of it. The container ship market once again saw “sky-high” charter prices. An 11-year-old Panamax container ship with a capacity of 4,250 TEU from Greek shipowner Euroseas was chartered at a high price of US$200,000 a day, setting a new record again. The shipyard is fully booked with orders from major shipping companies, and the container factory is producing non-stop day and night. But will the international shipping market continue to be so prosperous? After the prosperity, it may also be…
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