Due to Covid 19 pandamic Chinese exporters are suffering from raising cost of shipping containers and extreme shortage which strand in America and Europe . East China’s Yiwu, also known as China’s commodity-exporting hub, suffered a lot when container shortages first hit China starting September 2020, results in the sudden raise of prices.
Soton Daily Necessities, the world’s largest straw manufacturer, situated in Yiwu, has been struggling as it’s stocks piles up.Chairman of the company Lou Zhongping inform CGTN that they could not find any shipping containers at the initial stage of the shortages, and shipping prices are increasing than his company could manage.
“Now we have around $1 million’s worth of products in stock. We still don’t have enough containers. Even though we receive orders from abroad, we can’t arrange the production and shipment as planned. I wish shipping ports, such as Ningbo Port and Shanghai Port, could allocate some of the resources to local enterprises directly,” said Lou.
Big data should be employed to scientifically distribute the shipping containers, and more should be done with the government’s help to bring the empty containers back to China, professor Liu Chunsheng from Central University of Finance and Economics suggested.
The pandemic still rampant in Europe and America, due to drastic reduction of China’s imports, shipping containers are not returning to China, said Li Qianmin, general manager of Shanghai Universal Logistics Equipment, the world’s second largest container manufacturer, which is currently producing about 5000 transmission extension units of shipping containers.
“The pandemic was handled well in China, whose production and foreign trade became stable. China’s surrounding countries didn’t cope well with the pandemic. Products have been shipped overseas, but containers are not returning from Europe and America, where the pandemic isn’t contained yet,” he said.
To ensure enough supplies of containers, two to three million TEUs of new containers need to be produced, estimated by industry insiders, and a large proportion is from China. Another factor that led to the reduced production of shipping containers in China and the high prices was the shortage of steel. “When products are exported to Europe or America, I would suggest the signing of contracts to bring these empty containers back. This could make a difference. Also, the government could offer bursaries, including for loading and unloading the empty containers. These may alleviate the tensions caused by container shortages,” said Liu.
