MILANO – The yellow, one sea voyage at a time, seemed destined to be resolved. The Ever Given accident – stranded in the Suez Canal – instead shuffled the cards again, complicating the puzzle that has been affecting world freight traffic for months: the mystery of the missing containers.
The availability of these immense 20- to 40-foot long caissons needed to cram the traveling material is reduced to a flicker. Prices, for the few who are there, have taken off: the current price of a container on the Genoa-Shanghai is $ 8,105, 312% more than a year ago.
How come there are no more? Who and how managed to make part of the 40 million containers theoretically available on the market vanish into thin air (at least in appearance)? There are many explanations. And the first, of course, is the chaos into which global shipping has plunged with the pandemic.
The problems began as soon as Covid – which started from China – began to overflow into the rest of the world. Many ships have been stopped. Several factories have closed. And the container traffic went haywire. Many – with no one to withdraw them – were stuck in ports. Other in the warehouses of companies blocked by the virus. Several Chinese companies have not been able to collect the “empty” in Europe and America to bring back to Asia for new cargoes.
The rapid recovery of Beijing’s economy has complicated matters. The center of gravity of world maritime traffic – with Europe and the US stationary – has shifted in a chaotic manner in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Exports from China have resumed great with a river of containers (about 900 thousand per month) shipped to the USA. The only problem: the times of their travels have lengthened due to health protocols and staff holes – today in American ports there is an average queue of 90 ships to unload – and even today only 60 of the containers arrived are brought back. The rest accumulates there.
The result is evident: the metal caissons have not really disappeared, but they are stuck where they are not needed and there are not where they are needed. A problem aggravated by another problem: in 2020 the containers scrapped or lost at sea (3.3 million) were more than those built from scratch (2 million). And with commodity prices skyrocketing, buying them now – the sector is dominated by the Chinese – costs an arm and a leg, to be exact 60 & more than a year ago. And the Ever Given accident in Suez, with hundreds of thousands of containers blocked around Suez, will certainly not help to resolve the situation.
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