Prizes on freight has skyrocket
Event though we are pleased to have a busy schedule, we are also facing a severe economic consequence of the pandemic.
Unfortunately, the consequence affect our customers and other business partners as well.
Prizes on container freight has grown to a level that is 5-6 times higher than it was before the pandemic.
China opened, the rest of the World shut down
China managed to get the virus under control rather fast.
Meanwhile the virus was spreading all across the World. This forced most countries to lockdown.
These lockdowns went on for a very long time
Huge demand through the Internet
In a matter of few months, China was able to produce almost at the same level as before corona.
The Internet, and especially in the US, made sure that there was a demand for China goods.
At the same time, there was a very limited demand for transporting goods to China.
Empty containers
This unequal demand let to a whole fleet of empty containers going to China.
This is in and of itself a problem, which will make transportation more expensive.
On top of this comes a lack of containers due to the increased transport to the US. The reason is that it takes more time to handle a container in the US compared to other countries. This also ads to the increased prizes.
The consequence
We keep an eye on this issue.
At this point, the prizes are sky-high. However, we expect the prizes to get lower.
According to one of our business partners at the shipping industry, Leman, prizes will probably end up at a higher level compared to prizes before the pandemic. In other words we can expect prizes to end up higher than the around 1800 dollars we had to pay for a forty feet container in early 2020.
