JOC.com reports, “Just as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spreads from China to North America, the disruptive impact of the pandemic will shift from worries about securing goods to intensified volume pressures on the containerized supply chain.
Coronavirus brings famine before feast for trans-Pacific container volumes
While Chinese manufacturing and trucking capacity is recovering as workers return from quarantine, the surge of containerized exports being produced threaten to overwhelm some North American ports and inland networks. And with trans-Pacific carriers having aggressively slashed capacity, canceling more than 80 vessels to the West Coast from early February to early April, cargo owners could find that freight contracted at rates below the current spot rate pricing is being rolled — i.e., pushed to a later sailing than was booked.
“Volumes are low now for everybody, but come May, it will be just the opposite,” Scott Weiss, vice president of business development at Port Logistics Group, told JOC.com. “I’m telling all of our customers, ‘Don’t be fooled because volumes now are low.’”
