6 August (Lloyd's List) - A RECOVERY in volumes to the US west coast helped push the Asia-North America volumes into positive territory for the first time this year in August, according to the latest figures from Container Trades Statistics.
“The rally in the Far East-North America volumes continued with an 8.2% increase compared with July 2023 and a 7.1% increase compared with August 2022,” CTS said.
“Notably, it is the first month in which volumes have been above 2m in 2023.”
Year to date figures remain negative. However, the decline has eased to 14.3%.
“While the year-to-date decline is evenly spread on the east and the west coast of the US, the recent upturn is predominantly on the west coast,” CTS said.
Elsewhere, the Asia-Europe trade in August, the latest month for which figures are available, continued increases on both year-on-year and year-to-date bases, at 6.2% and 3.3% respectively, and the Mediterranean continued its strong performance with a 17.4 % increase on a year-to-date basis.
CTS said stronger volumes were also seen outside the main head haul trades, particularly for sub-Saharan African exports, and both import and export trades to and from the Indian sub-continent and Middle East.
Nevertheless, global volumes still remain down 3.3% compared with the first eight months of 2022.
“Overall global volumes continued to show some strength in August, the main difference compared with recent months is the upturn in Far East to North America volumes, accompanied by a rate upturn,” CTS said.
“The market clearly showing an element of restocking after a long period of lower volumes. Has this minor recovery got any momentum; the overall economic outlook suggests not but the market has shown lots of areas of surprise and recent months.”
The August volumes slowed the rate of rates decline, CTS added, with the Global Price Index falling only one point to 74 in August. But it still remains down by 119 points compared with the corresponding month in the past year.
Moreover, the August bump appears to be a short-lived phenomenon. Drewry’s World Container Index decreased by 1.1% to $1,389.5 per feu this week and is now down 62% year on year.
“It is by now very clear that the peak season was a dud from the container lines’ perspective,” Vespucci Maritime chief executive Lars Jensen said of September’s market developments.
He said that the market was at a crossroads at which it was clear that demand did not support carrier deployments of capacity in their current networks.
“It is also clear that the continuing delivery of more new vessels will only make this worse,” Jensen said. “Unless the carriers change behaviour, we could be facing a much more severe downturn in rates in the coming months.”
