Even Golden Week won't ease the pain
On the basis of current deployment schedules, Copenhagen-based maritime intelligence provider Sea-Intelligence predicts that offered vessel capacity on Asia-North America West Coast will be between 420,000-460,000 teu in the four-week Golden week period (weeks 40-43), whereas it has never crossed 380,000 teu in 2014-2020. Over the four weeks, 1.74 million teu will be available, an unprecedented 30.8% increase in comparison to the modest 2014-2020 average of 3.9%.
CEO Alan Murphy commented: "It seems that carriers are either anticipating no Golden Week slowdown in demand, or that they are prepared to keep the increased levels of deployed capacity, in the hopes of clearing backlog from congested ports." Moreover, carriers will only withdraw 3.4% of the deployed capacity across these four weeks in 2021, against an average reduction of 8.5% in 2014-2020. (cd)