Hapag-Lloyd CEO expects shipping normalization after Chinese Year 2022
Hapag-Lloyd’s operational challenges are to remain up to the first quarter of the year to come Port congestion and elevated rates resulted from the growing demand driven by continuous high consumption, stimulus programs, stock replenishments and increased vaccination rates would survive the rest of 2021 up to Q1 2022, IAA PortNews correspondent cites Rolf Habben Jansen, Hapag-Lloyd CEO, as saying at the online Press Briefing.
“The strong demand combined with COVID-related restrictions and unexpected surge in volume have led to quite a lot of difficulties in the global supply chain. If we look at the container usage in the first half of this year, the time to take the container back is up to 20%. It means that we need 20% containers more to transport the same amount of volume. And the bottleneck here is the port and inland infrastructure capacity. The capacity in many ports remains strained nowadays. This is the case in Asia, where we have significant delays if we look at Korea, China, also Singapore. As for the Europe and US, definitely, we have very significant waiting times in a number of ports. Of course, this gives us a lot of difficulties because even if we deploy the ships it remains very difficult to unload them and get them back on time to reload again”, - stated the Chief Executive of the world's number five operator.
To meet the challenge and to limit the impact thereof on the customers the company has implemented a number of countermeasures, including re-routement of cargo through alternative gateways to bypass the congested ports, purchase of additional containers, involvement of a greater number of employees and implementation of advanced digital solutions to improve the service quality.
“I think it’s better than 50% chance that we will start seeing an easy congestion after the Chinese New Year and hopefully going back to somewhat more normal situation until mid of next year”, - concluded Habben Jansen.
The press call was organized by Hapag-Lloyd Corporate Communications on September 30, 2021, and joined about 40 representatives from various shipping and engineering companies, news agencies and media outlets worldwide.
