Total 211 Posts
China's March PMI New Export Order came out as 50.4 in the morning session of 31 March, suggesting Chinese export order may have seen marginal sequential growth in March comparing to February. But March's 50.4 comparing to February's 52.4 means growth decelerated over the past month. Softness of exports from China could be a combination of the market share losses and overall soft demand in the western hemisphere. In terms of container shipment volume, China has been losing market share to the
Additional data for 30 departures returned today by our algo and there was little change, i.e the utilization level for vessels departed this week so far has been very high. Spot freight rates as represented by Shanghai Container Shipping Index (SCFI) has the first up move in a year. SCFI is usually trend sensitive in the way that if it moves up in one week, the chance of it moving up in the next week is over 50%. SCFI has published 720 editions since its inception in March 2009. Of these 720
Capacity utilization of all Inter-Regional trades and the 4 main east-west trades for vessels that have departed during the first 4 days of this week ( i.e. between 26 Mar and 29 Mar) moved up to level have not been seen since August last year. Although there has been week to week volatility, this set of data has been trending up since reaching a recent cycle low in week 5 of 2023. This 2-month up trend has to be looked at in connection with the sequential increase in capacity deployed into th
The cyclical or short term trend is the down turn in the container shipping volume , which has seen global port throughput falling for 5 consecutive months since September 2022, driven by the destocking cycle in the US, soft housing market in the US impacting particularly the housing related shipments, inflation that reduces western consumers' disposable income, rising share of services relative to goods in consumption. The secular trend or the long term trend maybe the fall in China's contrib
The latest China manufacturing PMI new export order index reported as 52.4 before market open on 1 March, suggesting the strongest expansion since March 2011. (source: National Bureau of Statistics). The PMI indices measure sequential changes and value above 50 for this index suggests expansion. Since January 2011 this index has produced only 51 expansionary values against 95 contractionary values. This latest print of 52.4 however contrasts with the anecdotal stories we heard about the current
This week's preliminary FE-WCNA utilization data dropped below 70% for the first since we started tracking this data series in Q4 2020. These preliminary data only covered 3-days of this week, i.e. 13-15 Feb, where 11 vessels have left Far East to head to West Coast North America. Among the 11 vessels, the utilization level ranges from 44% to 88% but all except one were at or below 80%. The average utilization in this route have been around 83% over the last two years. Resumption of services
The intra-Asia tradelanes are coming under the most pressure at the moment with rates on several key corridors already slipping to pre-2020 levels as capacity that were previously redeployed to the Transpacific are now returning to Asia. Total containership capacity employed on the Intra-Far East routes is rising again after a 2 year decline, as ships that were redeployed to the more lucrative long-haul trades now returning in large numbers. Intra-FE capacity peaked in early 2020 at 3m teu bu
The active fleet has started to creep upwards and is now at their highest levels since 2020, reaching 17.7m teu on lower idling and drydocking positions as well as easing congestion in North America and Europe. The pick up in vessel scrapping has hardly made a dent on the overall supply of ships as it is limited to smaller ships. The delivery schedule for new ships is picking up as well, with over 2.5m teu of new capacity scheduled in 2023. The idle containership fleet continued to fall, with
The Golden Week holidays in China provided little respite for the sliding freight and charter rates. There was no SCFI publication last week due to the Chinese holidays but SCFIS (SCFI on Settled Rates), another index also from Shanghai Shipping Exchange, was published yesterday (10 Oct) where the SCFIS for Shanghai-USWC has fallen to level last seen in May 2020: 1,384, down 11% from the last print on 26 Sep. The SCFIS for Shanghai-Northern Europe was 3,434, fell 13% since 26 Sep but still a mul
The SCFI composite index has fallen by 59% from its peak in January 2022, but rates remain elevated against their historical averages despite the recent drops. In 2019, the composite index stood at just 811 points compared to 2,072 points currently. Rates from China to South Africa, Europe, South America and Australia in particular are all expected to come under pressure over the coming weeks as they remain well above their 2019 average. In week 38, spot rates to the US West Coast continued to