Economic crunch hits empty container balance

In the Far East a throng of container ships lie still and silent in selected safe anchorages, and ports and depots across the entire region are bursting at the seams with empty boxes. More than 1.35-million TEUs of shipboard container capacity is currently sitting idle, with shipowners struggling to get sustainable freight rates, and hundreds of thousands of empty boxes are littering ports across Asia – especially in China and Japan, where export volumes have gone for a ball of chalk. One shipping line told FTW that this drop in exports had left a problem with off-hiring containers in the Far East – where containers contracted to a line are hired to third parties when they’re not needed. But the previous struggle by all the lines to relocate boxes to the Far East and Europe, for example, where a boom in seafreight exports had left glaring shortages of container capacity, has died a death with the global financial crisis and the accompanying collapse in trade volumes. “It’s gone from a serious lack of boxes to a surfeit,” a ship’s agent told FTW – also agreeing that off-hiring was impossible in a market already glutted with surplus empties. “And it’s a snowball effect,” he said. “Originally all the independent container depots were full, and it’s now hitting us directly, with our own depots also getting cramped for space.” It has left the slot capacities previously reserved by the lines for returning empties a little bare. This wealth of empty boxes is also filtering back to SAwhere a shortage of them has previously always seen the market being “first come, first served”, according to Gareth Weir of container leasing company, Triton. “But we’re now seeing SA getting more flush with empties, and stocks are beginning to build up,” he said, “And they’re likely to keep trickling in, not just from the Far East but also Europe – where ports like Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg are getting short on exports and long on empty boxes.” Lindsey Heynes of Grindrod Intermodal agreed. “Everybody’s saying that they can’t get empty containers into the Far East,” she told FTW, “and shipments of them have obviously died down.” In Durban at least, she added, stocks have started to build. Not that this causes trouble. Quite the opposite. Said Heynes: “From our point of view that’s fine. We need more stock, and the nearer empty container depots are to 100% full, the happier depot operators are. “We could still take more.”