SA makes little headway in diminishing outgoing empties

SOUTH AFRICA’S perennial trade imbalance problem continues to challenge the market, with exporters in the pound seats when it comes to freight rate levels. An FTW investigation last October revealed that just under 40% of all containers leaving SA shores for foreign parts were empty boxes being repositioned to where refills were available. Using Transnet National Ports Authority (TNPA) figures for that month, our source showed that empties equalled 64.78% of the total of full containers shipped out deepsea. He said this had an advantage for his company’s movement of product to the Far East. The rates were “exceptionally low”, he said, “because lines are happy just to reposition the boxes”. He pointed to a similar situation in Chile, where they have a lot of consumer goods going into the country. But, instead of moving empty boxes out, they are now containerising a lot of previously breakbulk cargo – especially metals. However, if this country were to follow suit, it would only reduce SA’s breakbulk volumes, and would not serve what he described as “the other vital purpose” of reducing port congestion. “To do that,” he said, “what we need to do is take things a step further. SA needs to change its economic policies to encourage beneficiation and further local production – cut down on imports and export full containers rather than empties.” But those words haven’t met with any significant practical application in the last year. Using a three-month running average calculated from the latest available TNPA port stats, FTW found that – although the figures have all got higher – the percentage of empties still remains at about the same levels. Of the total of all containers shipped deepsea out of SA ports, 35.78% were empties. Compared to the total of full boxes, empty containers made up 55.7%.