Crazy! Lottery booking! The sky-high sea freight of 10,000 US dollars! Hard to find a box! Hard to find a cabin! Difficulty!

Hard to find a box! Hard to find a cabin! Now it seems to have become the main theme of this industry!

Recently, the China-Europe freight train lottery booking and the sky-high sea freight of 10,000 US dollars have been screened in the circle of friends in the industry, and there have been a lot of discussions, all of which show the suffering and difficulties of foreign traders.

NO.1
2021 China-Europe Express Lottery Booking

We have all seen house lottery, car lottery, degree lottery...booking lottery! I believe many people have heard of it for the first time, but this seems to have happened.

It is reported that at this conference, 12 train platform companies including Yixinou issued a total of 2,000 train seats by lottery. Participants were rushing to book.

In the booking link, each freight forwarder participating in the conference can only book a maximum of 3 routes and 20 seats. Lottery is required when the total amount of bookings exceeds the amount of bookings.

The winning company is not the actual class, but the priority to honor the booking right of the reserved class within the agreed time.

China National Railway Group Co., Ltd. recently announced that as of November 5, the number of China-Europe freight trains has reached 10,180 this year, setting a new record again, transporting 927,000 TEU containers, an increase of 54% year-on-year, and the round-trip comprehensive heavy container rate reached 98.3%. , Access to 92 cities in 21 countries in Europe.

Due to the continuous influence of the hot market, the booking space of some routes is 6 times that of the actual routes!

The start of the China-Europe freight train booking lottery is a contradiction between the urgent need for export capacity in foreign trade and the lack of transportation capacity. Insufficient transportation capacity has led to the need to re-allocate resources according to market demand, and lottery came into being.

Faced with container shipping shortages, warehouse explosions, container dumps, and skyrocketing freight rates... Will there be lottery bookings in the shipping market? We dare not imagine!

NO.2
The sky-high freight rate of 10,000 US dollars "turned out"

Recently, some media reported that a 40-foot high container from Yantian to Algeciras, Spain, was quoted at a sky-high price of US$10,000!

Shanghai, Ningbo, Qingdao are still short of containers, and freight forwarders are experiencing the high freight rates of 4000 in South America, 5000 in East US, and Southeast Asia, which have skyrocketed by 1000 overnight, and there is no space or cabinet.

Under the contradiction between supply and demand, prices are skyrocketing. The China Export Container Price Index released by the Shanghai Aviation Exchange has surged from below 850 points in May to 1107.28 points on November 13, setting a new high in recent years.

It is understood that the price of a 40-foot container from Guangzhou to New York in the United States has risen to US$5,000, more than three times the price before the epidemic. The price increase of special cabinets is even more crazy. Some freight forwarders have their prices increased by 4,000 US dollars by shipping companies in just one week. Some special cabinets in northern ports have increased their prices to 10,000 US dollars. The price of special cabinets before the epidemic was only about 1,000 US dollars.

Containers are in madness, and it is difficult to stop price increases due to supervision. The industry believes that the shortage of containers will continue at least until the first half of next year. Export companies and freight forwarders will continue to bear cost pressures for a period of time, while upstream shipping companies and container manufacturers will have some dividends.

Industry insiders pointed out that the global shipping market will continue to be "difficult to find one ship and hard to find one box", and mainstream shipping companies have booked space until late December.

"To some extent, there is no upper limit on freight, depending on how much the shipper is willing to pay for the shipment."

The status quo of the shipping market will hardly be eased this year.

NO.3
It's hard to find a box in China, where is the box?

At this time, in large ports such as Qingdao, Lianyungang, Ningbo, and Shanghai, the extreme shortage of containers is causing delays in ship berthing operations and the ports are under pressure. On the far side of the ocean, many European and American ports have experienced serious congestion due to the surge in containers.

The main reason for this is that the epidemic has affected normal global trade. It is expected that after the epidemic is brought under control, the hard-to-find domestic case will gradually disappear.

Looking at the world, it is not difficult to find that the global market is seriously uneven.

The United States Port Trucking Association (HTA) stated that in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach alone, 10,000-15,000 containers were stranded at the terminals, causing the current cargo transportation of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to "nearly paralyze"; West Coast ports and Chicago are also right. The large number of empty containers brought about by the surge in imports is helpless.

Not only in the United States, but also in Australia and the United Kingdom, the backlog of a large number of empty containers is getting worse. It is estimated that the number of empty containers in Australia alone exceeds 50,000.

The number of ships coming out of China is relatively large, but the number of ships coming out of places such as Europe and the United States is small. In this context, China ships containers one by one, but few return, causing a large accumulation of European and American containers. A box is hard to find.

NO.4
Multiple factors push up freight rates

As for the reason for the recent boom in the shipping market, industry insiders said that it was the result of multiple factors. On the one hand, due to the global epidemic, demand was suppressed in the first half of the year, and many businesses had the need to replenish inventory; on the other hand, a large number of epidemic prevention materials were exported, and the demand for home shopping in overseas markets increased.

In addition, the poor turnover of shipping containers further pushed up freight rates.

In a recent survey conducted by investors, CIMC said: “Currently, our company’s container orders have been scheduled to around the Spring Festival next year. The demand in the container market has increased significantly recently. The reasons are that first, affected by the epidemic, exported containers are scattered all over the world. The return is not smooth; second, foreign governments have introduced financial stimulus such as the epidemic relief plan, which has led to super strong performance on the demand side (such as living and office supplies) in the short term, and the housing economy is booming. It is currently judged that the “lack of boxes” situation will continue for at least some time. But the whole year of next year is not clear."

Industry insiders said bluntly: “It’s still hard to say that the shipping industry has fully recovered. On the whole, the global epidemic is a negative factor for the shipping industry. The epidemic has changed the cargo shipment cycle, and the traditional shipping seasonal characteristics are not so obvious.”