Recession ‘cures’ US container shortage

As a sign of the tight times in trade, the shortage of containers to ship American goods out through the various export channels expressed to FTW by readers a year ago, is no more. This lack of boxes hit press pages all across the US in the first half of last year, even taking space in the prestigious finance publication, The Wall Street Journal. The cost of shipping a forty-foot (12-metre) equivalent unit (FEU) from the US west coast to China jumped by 20% in the 2007/08 period, said the report. “And this,” it added, “has exacerbated a shortage of boxes already created by an American consumer slump caused by the US sub-prime crisis that has reduced the number of containers coming into the country.” Shipping lines in SA were very careful in their allocation of the few available boxes, with many of them giving preference to customers with whom they had built strong, long-lasting relationships. But no more. The global trade smash has now seriously hit both US import and export volumes, and a similar oversupply in the other trade markets is leaving unused, empty boxes littering international ports in hundreds of thousands. In May last year, Richard Rattray, MD of Concordia International Forwarding Corporation in SA, alerted FTW to the fact that the general shortage of boxes of all types was having an effect on US-SA trade flows. “That’s not the case now,” he said. “With a big drop in demand because of the current economic crisis, there’s just no problem in getting containers.” Corinne French of United Maritime Logistics was also a complainant last year. But she is now, singing another song. “This time last year,” French added, “the majority of carriers were totally out of all sizes of containers, and some of our customers were incurring additional costs because of the repositioning of containers in order to meet deadlines.” But she finds things much better now. “There’s still a bit of a shortage of open-tops,” she said, “but hi-cubes, the main demand in containers for US exports, are in plentiful supply.”