Burden on world trade Freighters back up off southern China

As of: 21.06.2021 8:59 a.m.

The container ships are stowed in the fourth largest port in the world. The reason is a corona outbreak in Shenzhen-Yantian. The international movement of goods is impaired – possibly until the end of the year.

From Steffen Wurzel, ARD studio Shanghai

The congestion of the container ships off southern China is worse than that Blockade of the Suez Canal in March This is how Vincent Clerc, manager of the Danish shipping company Maersk, summed it up in a conversation with journalists in mid-June. At times, around 130 container ships from all over the world were anchored off the port of Shenzhen-Yantian, as reported by the Bloomberg news agency.

Weeks-long consequences for world trade

The reason for the traffic jam is a new – albeit small – corona outbreak in the southern Chinese part of Guangdong, where Shenzhen is located. Because the local authorities ordered the port of Shenzhen to be partially closed due to the corona, ships could not dock and cast off. Supply chains worldwide are out of step. German companies in the Guangdong region are also reporting that department stores are sometimes overcrowded. In the meantime, the situation in Guangdong has normalized, but weeks will pass before the backlog has completely cleared, estimates Nick Marro, an analyst for world trade at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in Hong Kong. The backlog will therefore continue for weeks through the global supply chains.

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Traffic jam in the fourth largest port in the world

Shenzhen-Yantian is the fourth largest container port in the world; Last year more than 27 million standard containers (TEU) were handled there. For comparison: In Hamburg there were fewer than nine million containers in 2020, i.e. around a third of them.

The logistics delays are a problem especially for the tech and electronics industry: around 90 percent of all electronics exports from China go through the port of Shenzhen-Yantian. Analyst Nick Marro expects the situation to remain tense, given the global openings after the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Relaxation probably only towards the end of the year

“There is no sign of an end to global consumer demand for goods and products. In many western countries, stocks are usually replenished in the third quarter of the year, which continues to ensure high trading activity,” says Marro. “This suggests that the tensions in global logistics and at the ports will not ease until the fourth quarter of the year.” In China, almost no reports are made of the container ship congestion in front of the port of Shenzhen-Yantian