(Newser)
– There have been many stories about the shortage of COVID, from semiconductor chips to toilet paper. CNN adds shipping containers to this category. What used to be a fairly cheap commodity (a year ago a 40-foot steel container could be rented on a ship going from China to Europe for less than $ 2,000) has become increasingly scarce and expensive. . Booking this same container costs more than $ 14,000 these days. How the dominoes fell: the pandemic caused the major shipping lines to cancel a series of voyages. As a result, when things started to heat up again, those empty boxes had not been returned to China.
And the situation has only persisted. This is due to several reasons. Much of what is transported in reverse …a China: It’s something as cheap as paper waste. With the shipping prices where they are, these trips make no economic sense at the moment. But on the contrary, going back to empty containers in China as soon as possible makes sense, because exports have such a high price; this causes inland companies to struggle to get shipping lines to waste time sending them boxes.
In addition, there is a bottleneck in ports, with ships taking up to four times longer to dock and unload, further reducing the number of containers available. In fact, the South China Morning Post reported that China’s main port of Ningbo-Zhoushan was closed on August 11 due to the positive case of the delta variant of a dock worker; things did not return to normal for a full 14 days.
And all this happens in the middle of the record production: The Wall Street Journal reported in early August that the 5.4 million equivalent 20-foot units of steel containers are expected to be produced this year, mainly in China; in 2019 the corresponding figure was 2.8 million. As one expert said in the magazine, in principle, there are more than enough containers; they actually languish where they shouldn’t be. (A Brooklyn home consisting of shipping containers has recently been sold for $ 5 million.)