There have been lots of stories on container delays at US ports. This article is different - port delays at the originating end i.e. delays in Chinese ports.
How bad?
Well, Chinese ports are responsible for 27.7% of the delays.
From the charts, it looks like the number of vessels has almost doubled between Feb 2022 and April 2022. I’m guessing with the Covid related lockdown in Shanghai, it gets worse before it gets better.
Sticking with my major liner idea, ZIM Integrated (ZIM). Had trimmed my ZIM stake due to tax implications on dividends, But have since rebuilt the ZIM stake. Also, still like my container ship lessor idea, Global Ship Lease (GSL), for slightly different reasons.
My daughter says they are very close to locking down her community in Hefei, China, a city of about 8 million people. A community in a city is a set of tall apartment buildings, about the size of a big block. She calculated roughly 120,000 people. She is texting right now with her Chinese contacts (her maid, the owner of her apartment) using translate. But at the same time she’s texting with associates at her school, trying to figure out if she could get stuck at her school (they have on-campus housing, but she lives across the street away from the school complex) so it dawned on her today she might get stuck at school with nothing. And her 3 cats and all her stockpiled food, etc., trapped at her building that she can’t get to. People are panic buying and places like large grocery stores which are usually crowded are emptying out for fear of being trapped there.
I think people here may not realize that the pandemic is escalating in China. If they have one case of Covid in a complex, they’ll quarantine them.
I have believed all along that China did an amazing job of shutting down Covid, but it was inevitable that Covid would spread like crazy, that their zero Covid policy would be impossible to continue. I think the zero Covid policy is stupid in the long run and we might just see the results in the next few weeks. I also think the United States was on the opposite side of the spectrum and handled the pandemic poorly. There were not many places that handled it well, but I think South Korea might be one.
Yes, I do think a definitions of “lockdown” is different for the US vs other places/countries, with China probably the extreme end of the scale. I would imagine, with your daughter being a foreigner, the language situation adds more complexity to an already challenging situation.
There were not many places that handled it well, but I think South Korea might be one.
Portugal handled it well. Not being densely populated sure helps. The capital, Lisbon, had more problems than Porto. Maybe the biggest problem was the loss of tourism, lots of businesses closed for good.