Chinese exports are witnessing a significant slowdown, and factories are not receiving as many orders as before, says South China Morning Post (SCMP).
On the road leading to Yantian International Container Terminal, one of China’s biggest container terminals, a row of parked trucks with no containers can be seen, stretching to nearly a kilometer.
A local driver told SCMP that the line-up is only a portion of the empty trucks in the city, adding that out of 15,000 registered truck drivers, only 2,000 have work at the moment.
While China continues to take measures to revive its economy after the pandemic, analysts claim that the country’s export sector will not recover as quickly as hoped. The current drop in demand, coupled with escalating geopolitical tension, are likely to remain for the next few months.
Yantian’s port authorities had reported in November that the volume of empties were record high, reported SCMP.
Christian Roeloffs, CEO and co-founder of Container xChange, said, “increased availability of containers in certain regions of the world are indicative of weak demand and slower economic growth.”
The World Economic Outlook report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was published last month and predicts that the economy will continue to slow down to the level of bottoming out this year.
Similarly, the world’s largest retail trade association, the National Retail Federation (NRF), forecasts retail imports to fall in February to their lowest point in three years.
Two years ago, it was hard to find empty shipping containers in China’s ports. Now, the scene of piled up containers at yards is slowly becoming the norm.
