Date: Friday, April 29, 2022
Source: Furniture Today
OXFORD, United Kingdom — MarineTraffic, a leading provider of ship tracking and maritime intelligence, noted recently that there are more twenty-foot-equivalent capacity waiting at ports on the East Coast of the U.S. than on the West Coast.
“As of today, 609,287 waiting TEU capacity was bound for the US. Of this, 186,000 are currently off the U.S. West Coast and 273,000 off the East,” according to MarineTraffic’s Twitter account. The ports considered in these calculations are Long Beach and Los Angeles on the West Coast and Charleston, S.C., and Norfolk, Va., on the East Coast.
East Coast ports are seeing an increase in traffic of up to 30%, according to Xeneta, which bills itself as the world’s largest database for ocean and air freight rates. “The ports are well utilized, and now they need to handle an additional 30% in existing terminals,” said Peter Sand, chief analyst for Xeneta.
Once the containers have been unloaded, as with Los Angeles and Long Beach, Sand said the East Coast is in danger of similar trucking delays with a lack of available truckers and lack of array capacity. Sand suggested close monitoring of the situation on the East Coast and indicated that “time will tell” how significant the disruption will be.
The workarounds that are being implemented to deal with previous West Coast port congestion are working for now. COVID lockdowns in China have slowed the movement of Chinese exports, and Xeneta expects that anticipated COVID restrictions on trucking within China will reduce availability.
According to Sand, no matter what the official view is from China, “you probably won’t see a flurry of cargo leaving China” once this takes effect.