Unabating demand for recovery from the lockdown impact of Covid-19 on the Asia-North America West Coast (Asia-NAWC) trade lane continues to push rates higher, Sea Intelligence (SI) has reported.
In its latest assessment of skyrocketing cargo costs, the maritime research consultancy says that the current boom and the high freight rate environment presents a big opportunity for carriers to not only fill up vessels on existing liner services, but also to launch new services.
With the Transpacific trade lane’s tendency to drag the global shipping line industry along in its wake, a freight forwarder in Cape Town this morning told Freight News that “it cannot continue like this.
“We’ll be put out of business if rates continue to spiral out of reach as they currently are.”
He said the matter would top the agenda at a catch-up meeting of private sector stakeholders and ports authority officials tomorrow, alongside discussions about recovery from the Transnet cyber breach that brought the ports and railways network to a standstill recently.
Such is the momentum of Asia-NAWC recovery, SI reports, that “there was a steady increase on the trade lane, with 39 weekly liner services offered in August 2020, rising to 42 by December 2020, and finally to 53 from August 2021 onwards”.
It was the highest point liner services have reached since 2012, SI said.
More specifically, the consultancy added that this increase was driven by the non-alliance services in 2017-2020 to 23 August 2012.
“From a pre-pandemic base of 10 weekly non-alliance services, 13 new non-alliance services have been launched in the trade lane, 12 of which made the first departure in 2021.”
SI stressed that all these services were standalone, meaning the operating carrier had full allocation of the capacity on board each vessel, with three of these services offered by newcomers on the trade.
