Congestion and delays have increased the time it takes a container to get from Beijing to Chicago to more than 70 days from about 30 days, Mr. Bentzel said. Write to Paul Berger at Paul. Berger wsj. All Rights Reserved. Skip to Main Content Skip to Search.
News Corp is a global, diversified media and information services company focused on creating and distributing authoritative and engaging content and other products and services. Dow Jones. Newsletter Sign-up. The Logistics Report Top news and in-depth analysis on the world of logistics, from supply chain to transport and technology. Asides from the impacts of Covid disturbing the usual flow of trade and container availability, another major factor was the Chinese New Year.
Celebrated on 12 February, the holiday played a part more than ever this year when it comes to container shortage. Generally, at this time of year, the industry can expect to see an increase in container tariffs and a slowdown of Chinese production due to most of the population being on holiday.
Global industry giants thrown off balance Many industry shipping giants, such as Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, have been hit hard by the global container shortage, which has resulted in them adapting their methods and facing shipping setbacks.
Hapag-Lloyd has thought outside the box when it comes to adapting their containers for alternative uses. Turning the reefer containers off allows dry goods such as shoes, electronics, or textiles to be sent to reefer demand locations. Once there, they can be emptied and switched back on to continue their journey. We looked at containers that are currently in repair or ones which are meant to be sold because they have reached a certain age.
With the situation being unprecedented and ever shifting, Haupt stresses the importance of close industry collaboration to prevent situations like this from occurring again. Ian Doherty, CEO of Hexstone Group, and vice-chairman of the British and Irish Association of Fastener Distributors, speaks about Hexstone having a stock of product — normally holding between four or five months worth in the UK — to minimise the disruption that issues like this can cause.
However, the company has still been affected. We are constantly having containers put back. Congestion at the port has been going on for several months, which has led certain cargo ships to drop containers at Northern European ports to avoid delays.
This typically adds a further two weeks to lead times, adding further pressure on container availability. New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system.
Most likely, those goods—as well as your smartphone, refrigerator, and virtually every other object in your home—once were loaded onto a large container in another country and traveled thousands of miles via ships crossing the ocean before ultimately arriving at your doorstep.
The rest is mainly commodities like oil or grains that are poured directly into the hull. In short, without the standardized container, the global supply chain that society depends upon—and that I study —would not exist.
A recent shortage of these containers is raising costs and snarling supply chains of thousands of products across the world. The situation highlights the importance of the simple yet essential cargo containers that, from a distance, resemble Lego blocks floating on the sea. Since the dawn of commerce, people have been using boxes, sacks, barrels, and containers of varying sizes to transport goods over long distances.
Phoenicians in B. Egypt ferried wood, fabrics, and glass to Arabia in sacks via camel-driven caravans. And hundreds of years later, the Greeks used ancient storage containers known as amphorae to transport wine, olive oil, and grain on triremes that plied the Mediterranean and neighboring seas to other ports in the region.
Even as trade grew more advanced, the process of loading and unloading as goods were transferred from one method of transportation to another remained very labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly , in part because containers came in all shapes and sizes.
Containers from a ship being transferred onto a smaller rail car, for example, often had to be opened up and repacked into a boxcar.
Different-sized packages also meant space on a ship could not be effectively utilized, and also created weight and balance challenges for a vessel. And goods were more likely to experience damage from handling or theft due to exposure. The U. But it was not until the s that American entrepreneur Malcolm McLean realized that by standardizing the size of the containers being used in global trade, loading and unloading of ships and trains could be at least partially mechanized, thereby making the transfer from one mode of transportation to another seamless.
This way products could remain in their containers from the point of manufacture to delivery, resulting in reduced costs in terms of labor and potential damage.
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