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US freight forwarder Flexport: The current market needs 500,000 new containers to meet the demand
According to Bloomberg, U.S. freight forwarder Flexport says 500,000 new 20-foot containers are needed to meet the current hot consolidation market.
In comments to Bloomberg, Nerijus Poskus, the company’s vice president of global Marine operations, estimated that hundreds of thousands of new containers would be needed to meet current market demand.
Putting all this together, 500,000 new containers is enough to fill 25 of the world’s largest container ships, Bloomberg writes.The media also cited satellite data showing that nearly three dozen ships are currently waiting for berths at two ports near Los Angeles.That’s up from the level before Christmas, when Bloomberg reported 20 container ships were anchored near the two ports.
The surge in demand has also caused the price of shipping a standard container across the Pacific to increase several times, according to a Flexport vice president, and that figure does not include the additional costs associated with the container and the insurance premium to guarantee loading.
“Anyone paying shipping costs in 2020 knows that the true shipping costs will be even higher than the recent increase,” Poskus said.We expect transport costs to only increase by 2021.”
Criticism of shipping companies has been mounting for months, but the World Shipping Council, a big lobby group, has previously said that the blame for the situation does not lie solely with them.
