Daily Coffee Report 8/13/26
Daily coffee report
StoneX Coffee Team
- Coffee
Congestion At Ports Continues To Plague West Coast US, But Container Shortage Eases
By: Alexis Rubinstein, Managing Editor - Coffee Network
Congestion At Ports Continues To Plague West Coast US, But Container Shortage Eases CoffeeNetwork (New York) – According to a new study from Sea Intelligence, China’s continuing zero-tolerance policy towards Covid in 2022 have created an ever-present threat of port closures and operational restrictions, as seen at both Ningbo and Shanghai. Along with Chinese New Year, these restrictions will likely have eased some burden on the volume flows out of China, but likely also have created additional backlog.
On a Y/Y basis, the laden inbound volumes contracted heavily in the second half of 2021, but the annualized growth over 2019 shows that this is more an artefact of strong 2020-2H growth. When annualized over 2019, January 2022 volume growth was in line with January 2019, contracting by a marginal -0.1%, while February grew by 6.8%, which is within the range of what we have seen for most of 2021. March 2022, however, grew by 14.2% when annualized over March 2019, which is the strongest growth in almost a year. This spike in March 2022 is possibly a result of the backlog that was cleared after the port closure of Ningbo earlier in the year and then Chinese New Year that followed, as well as the initial operational restrictions in Shanghai more recently.
Further to that, while carriers continue to prioritize empty container exports out of North America West Coast, growing at a rate of around 20% for the past 18 months, in January-March 2022, laden exports contracted at a slower rate of 5%-10%, compared to 10-15% seen in the second half of 2021. A possible explanation is that the port closure of Ningbo for 14 days at the start of 2022 resulted in a pile of empty containers in the port, containers that had been offloaded before the port closed and had since been emptied. It is possible that the carriers deemed that level of empties as sufficient for the time being and therefore cleared out some export cargo from the North America West Coast ports.
Over the past 2 years, congestion in the supply chain has led to a significant extension of the transportation time, not only in relation to the ocean-side delays, but also in relation to inland congestion and delays. When the supply chain gets longer, there will naturally be a need for more containers, simply because each container is needed for a longer period of time. Conversely, this also means that once the supply chain normalizes, there will be a release of a significant number of containers, which are no longer needed.
To quantify that, Sea Intelligence looked at the data provided by Hapag-Lloyd and matched the transported cargo volume and the equipment fleet over a longer period of time. This all comes with the caveat that Hapag-Lloyd’s operational performance in relation to their equipment is taken as a proxy for the entire market.
They started the analysis by looking at the development in both the size of the equipment fleet as well as the number of transported containers over the past 12 years. This was followed by calculating the equipment efficiency, by looking at how many full loads of cargo were moved per container in the equipment fleet.
In 2010-2014, the effectiveness of the equipment fleet is relatively constant at 1.3 loads per container per quarter, followed by a lot of volatility in 2014-2017, and stabilizing again at an average of 1.18 full loads per container in 2018-2019. In 2020-2022 we see the effectiveness decline significantly to 0.95 loads per container in 2021-Q4, slightly improving to 0.98 in 2022-Q1.
Contemplating the normalization of the supply chain, in 2022-Q1, Hapag-Lloyd needed an equipment fleet of just over 3 million TEU to move their cargo. If the supply chain bottlenecks were removed now, Hapag-Lloyd would need 17% fewer containers in their equipment fleet, compared to what they have presently. If this is representative of the global market, there would be a need for 17% fewer containers than what we currently have.
The global container fleet reached 50 million TEU in 2021. If 17% of this becomes redundant, this equals 8.5 million TEU in excess equipment. Accommodating for the 4.5-4.8 million additional TEU to be delivered in 2022, and we end up with 13 million TEU of excess containers in 2023.
Alexis Rubinstein
- Coffee
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Daily Coffee Report 8/12/26
Daily coffee report
StoneX Coffee Team
- Coffee
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