News

With retail sales slowing across the United States, the National Retail Federate is forecasting the imports into the U.S.’s major container ports will plateau and decline slightly in the second half of the year with the potential for a deepening decline early in 2023. However, with retailers having brought merchandise in earlier this year and the overall strength in the first half of 2022, the retail trade association projects that total 2022 container imports will be ahead of 2021. “The heady days of growth in imports are quickly receding,” said Ben Hackett, founder of Hackett Associates which assembles the monthly report for the NRF. “The outlook is for a decline in volumes compared with 2021 over the next few months, and the decline is expected to deepen in 2023.” According to the monthly update for the Global Port Tracker, the NRF reports that imports at the U.S.’s major container ports were up 5.5 percent in the first half of 2022 to a total of 13.5 million TEU.

Port productivity remains a huge hurdle for the U.S. supply chain as billions of dollars of products are at anchor or landlocked, and a shift to use of East Coast ports over West Coast ports creates new pressures. In the past three months, vessel capacity between the Far East and the U.S. East Coast has risen by 18.9% year on year, according to ocean and air freight research firm Xeneta. While the West Coast continues to have the lead in market share of Far East containers at 59.8%, it is continuing to lose more capacity to the East Coast as logistic managers move away from the West Coast out of fear of a labor strike. In the last three months, container capacity also has dropped on the West Coast, by 1.7%.