Hundreds of container ships are dammed up in the North Sea

According to the online platform Sea-Explorer, 16 large container ships with a capacity of up to 18,000 standard containers (TEU) each are waiting to call at Hamburg or Bremerhaven in the German Bight alone. “The situation is even more dramatic in front of the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp,” reports Vincent Stamer, head of the Kiel Trade Indicator.

The situation in the North Sea ports has been tense for months. Especially in Rotterdam, the largest port in Europe, there were always traffic jams and overloads. The situation has worsened again in the last few days: While the number of container ships waiting in the past few months has seldom accounted for more than one percent of the world fleet, it is now almost twice as many.

The blockages can currently be viewed in the port of Hamburg. Because not only numerous container giants such as the Chinese “CSCL Saturn”, the “Al Muraykh” from Hapag-Lloyd/UASC or the Japanese “One Eagle” have been lying off Helgoland for days and are waiting to enter the Elbe. Hardly anything works in the port itself either. Ten container ships, including freighters from CMA CGM, Evergreen and Hyundai Merchant Marine, have moored at the quays of the terminal operators HHLA and Eurogate. There are usually just three to four box ships there.

Lack of space at ports for container ships

“This has absolutely nothing to do with the lockdown in Shanghai that was lifted a week and a half ago,” says a spokesman for the world’s largest sea freight forwarder, Kuehne + Nagel. Rescheduled ship transports from the Chinese metropolis can only be expected in northern Europe in four to six weeks – if not later.

Because ship exports from the Middle Kingdom are currently still seven percent below the value before the lockdowns in mid-March, as determined by the supply chain monitoring company Fourkites. The waiting times for the ships in China’s ports have long since returned to normal. At the peak of the lockdown in Shanghai, containers had to wait an average of 69 hours for loading, but now it is only 31. With a value of 27 hours, the port would have returned to the average of the past three years.

In the port of Hamburg, people are currently puzzling over the causes of the increasing traffic jams. “One of the biggest problems is that import containers are not picked up and thus clog the port,” says a spokesman for HHLA. The average pick-up time has increased from three to seven days, and some steel boxes are in the port for up to 50 days.

But that leads to problems with handling: “We can hardly accept export containers due to lack of space,” says HHLA. Even additional parking spaces that are off the beaten track in the port had to be activated.

At the Hamburg terminal operator, one can at best speculate as to the reasons why the onward transport of the arriving steel boxes is delayed. “It could be that the own storage capacities of many importers are exhausted,” suspects an HHLA spokesman. “The railway traffic, which is disrupted in many places, is probably one of the reasons.”

Strikes could cause further delays

Another cause could be added to Germany’s coast in the next few days. The third round of negotiations between the Verdi union and the port operators begins on June 10, which means that work stoppages are to be expected. Although the warning strikes that had been feared did not take place on Tuesday, the union distributed flyers in the ports, which advertised among the workforce for a “health day” on Wednesday. In Bremen and Hamburg in particular, it is expected that this could further delay operations.

Germany’s ports would be hit at the wrong time. “The fact that exports from Shanghai have increased again in recent weeks despite the lockdown measures shows that the companies there are in the starting blocks and can probably ramp up production again quickly once the lockdown is over,” expects IfW logistics expert Stamer. So far, exports worth up to 700 million euros from China to Germany have been lost due to the lockdown in the Chinese metropolis.

>> Read about this: Distortions in world trade: the ports of Shanghai and Hamburg become bottlenecks

The consulting firm Sea-Intelligence has now calculated what damage the supply bottlenecks have caused since the beginning of the corona pandemic. The researchers determined that importers’ warehousing had increased drastically for fear of stock shortages – from 260,000 TEU worldwide to 1.8 million. With an average goods value of $40,000 per container, Sea-Intelligence estimates that this has caused additional financing and storage costs of five to ten billion dollars. Expenditures that would not have arisen with functioning just-in-time deliveries.

But an end to the misery is by no means in sight. Delays in shipping have fallen from 70 to 57 million container days since the peak of the crisis. Before the pandemic, however, the average was just eight million. According to the IfW Kiel, more than eleven percent of all goods shipped worldwide are still stuck in traffic jams.

Only the ports on the US coast, which have been on the brink of collapse in recent months, are showing signs of relaxation these days. In the past few weeks, traffic jams have completely receded off Southern California ports such as Los Angeles and Long Beach. While three percent of the global container fleet was waiting there until recently, today their share is barely 0.5 percent.

Experts justify this with the shrunken demand of Americans for consumer goods from Asia. According to Federal Reserve Economic Data, they increased their spending on long-term consumer goods – and thus also on imports from the Far East – by 25.4 percent during the corona crisis in 2021. In May 2022, however, spending only stagnated compared to the previous month. Demand for container deliveries from the Far East is likely to have fallen accordingly in the USA.

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