By Richie Lin      Photo：Rafael de Campos，Link：Pexels

Carriers might see the market is not as good as they think, so they use blank sailings to keep up the rate.

Ocean freight rate reference in week 50:

2021 is coming to the last three weeks, everybody is reviewing the past situations and anticipating the future developments. Nobody is the psyche to predict the future 100% surely, but we can anticipate the situations based on what happened in the past several months. Recently, we saw on the news that shipping lines canceled around 34% capacity in the Trans-Pacific and Asia-Europe lanes, which will definitely increase the rate. Their main reasons are still port congestions, shortage of labors, shortage of containers, truckers, and chassis. Paradoxically, shipping lines should send more vessels to congested ports to move out the empty containers, so there are more spaces in the terminal to accept the other loaded containers. But carriers chose not to do this way because they don’t want this chaos to end soon. Carriers have used this once in a lifetime opportunity to make fortunes to cover their past loss, they will not give it up easily because shipping industry is still easily influenced by business cycle.

The ocean freight market has become a tug of war between shipping lines and customers. Each side will try their best to extend the benefits as much as possible.

People are still buying and most of suppliers still locate in Asia, the schedules from Asia to USA and Europe will not come to normal soon. Since supply and demand is still imbalance in still on-going, we can foresee the rate will not drop significantly until June 2022. However, the variants will be the exit of QE around November in 2022 and joining of 2000-teu vessels of carriers in 2023. At that time, customers might have bigger bargaining power to drag down the rate. So we can foresee rate will be staying the same level or even a little bit higher for next several months.

Following rate reference in week 50.

• Asia main ports to USAWC USD 11000~13000 per 40GP; 
• Asia main ports to USAEC USD 17000~20000 per 40GP;
• Asia main ports for IPI points of USA is USD 19000~23000 per 40GP. 

Please note above rate is only for reference, carriers might only give space for higher rate, which will be from USD 15,000~25,000 per 40GP for different destinations.

Airfreight market rate in Week 50:

The airfreight is updated each week to match the market situation. The following market rate for your reference. 

• PVG/SZX/HKG/TPE to LAX USD 20.0/kg, 
• PVG/SZX/HKG/TPE to ORD USD 20.0/kg, 
• PVG/SZX/HKG/TPE to JFK USD 23.0/kg.

Airfreight rate will keep increasing in December because ocean freight is too late for Christmas products to be put on shelves of stores on time.

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