Maersk sees no Europe Christmas season
China's exports to Europe have remained weak during the traditional peak season for shipping, but the country's trade with the US appears to have more traction, according to the chief executive officer of Maersk Lines.
Soren Skou, who took the helm this year of the container division of Denmark's A P Moller Maersk, said that his confidence in global trade has deteriorated since June, mostly due to recessionary conditions in Europe, but he said volumes world-wide are likely to expand four percent for the full year compared with 2011, reported Dow Jones Newswires.
August is a critical month for the containerised shipping industry, which depends on exports to the West from China for the bulk of its activity.
Skou said his customers appear to be positioning for satisfactory holiday spending in the US but not Europe. "The customers are expecting a Christmas season (in the US), which doesn't appear to be the case in Europe," he said.
The volume of Chinese exports to the US handled by Maersk is likely to rise two percent this year compared with 2011, he said, while its Europe-to-Asia volumes could slide three percent.
Skou said Maersk expects its world-wide container volumes to gain six percent in 2013, but that prediction hinges on a belief that Europe will rebound from recession.
Skou said Maersk volumes in China suggest structural changes for the No. 2 global economy, and that as a result the days of 10 percent annual growth in containerised shipping are gone.
"It's pretty clear China is losing competitiveness in a number of industries," he said, as production of shoes, toys and other labour-intensive goods moves toward countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh.
Maersk says it has seen weakness in Chinese exports creep up the coast, beginning in the country's south in the ports of Guangdong and increasingly to the eastern ports around Shanghai, though activity has remained stronger northward.
He said Maersk hasn't managed to hold rates at the highest levels of earlier this year but intends to pull shipping capacity off the market in coming months in an effort to underpin them.
