Ocean-shipping demand staying very strong, says Hapag-Lloyd CEO
MUNICH: Robust demand for shipping goods across the world’s oceans shows no signs of slowing down, said the chief executive of Germany’s largest container carrier, signalling that elevated rates in the tight market for seaborne cargo may extend into the second half of the year.
“Last week and this week, we’ve still seen very strong bookings,” said Hapag-Lloyd AG chief executive officer Rolf Habben Jansen on a conference call on Thursday. “So I don’t see any signs around the corner than demand is falling off a cliff.”
Through the second quarter and maybe into the third, “we’ll continue to see elevated rates, as there is simply less capacity available,” he said.
Hamburg, Germany-based Hapag-Lloyd
— the world’s fifthlargest container line — has spent the past year along with its rivals trying to adjust capacity to meet wide swings in factory production and consumer demand during Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and reopenings.
Already operating at full steam, the industry that ferries steel boxes full of products around the global economy suffered another jolt last month when a large vessel bound for Europe from Asia blocked traffic in the Suez Canal for six days.
That incident further slowed trade flows, and “box availability will be tight for the next six to eight weeks”, said Jansen in his presentation, citing ports in the United Kingdom and in Rotterdam, Europe’s largest for ocean
cargo, among the gateways facing delays.
In the United States, where companies have struggled to import their goods because of bottlenecks at major ports, “we see the situation improving, but only slowly”, he said.
“We hope to get back to some kind of normalcy towards the end of the second quarter or early in the third quarter, but that certainly is not a given and is probably
a bit of a best-case scenario but not impossible.” In Europe, “we expect the congestion issues to be significant in the next four weeks especially” but a return to normal was expected in the third quarter, he said.
There was some shipping congestion in Asia, but “nothing that can’t be managed”, he added.
To help alleviate the tight capacity, Jansen said Hapag-Lloyd was ordering more new containers
and urging customers to return the existing boxes in its fleet as quickly as possible.
In another reminder of how busy container shipping has stayed in recent months, the Port of Long Beach in California said on Thursday it handled the equivalent of 840,387 20ft containers last month, its busiest month on record during what’s usually one of the slowest times of the year.