By Arthur Chen      Photo：Hebert Santos

German small and medium-sized enterprises have been injured in the Chinese market because of the broken supply chain of logistics and raw materials.

Because of serious congestion caused ship berthing delays in ports on the west coast of the United States, as well as delays of intermodal transportation such as railroads and highways, and soaring transportation costs, shipping companies were forced to shift their service center core from the western United States to the eastern ports of the United States. A large number of shipping companies reconsidered the routes arrangement. For example, last month, MSC transferred its independent trans-Pacific service Santana from the US West to the US East to meet the continued strong demand for this route. MSC stated that after the Santana service is successfully transferred, the Port of Houston will be added to the service route to better serve the local market. The new Santana route calls at Haiphong in northern Vietnam and Shanghai and Ningbo ports in China, and deploys 10 vessels from 4300 to 6500teu. It is expected to complete the turnover within 10 weeks. So far, the number of container ships waiting for available berths in the San Pedro Bay area, as well as the number of container ships drifting 150 miles away, has continued to exceed 100 vessels, and some ships have to wait up to two months to start unloading. Severe delays in West Coast ports have caused some blank sailings across the Pacific and delayed the opening of the express routes. 

According to the October data, the import volume of the top ten U.S. container-hub ports shows that the East Coast ports outperformed the West Coast ports. The total number of containers unloaded from the berthing ships was 1,078,817 TEU, and the West Coast port unloaded volume was 1,057,045 TEU.  For East Coast and Gulf Bay ports, this represents better record year-on-year increase of 7.9%, while West Coast ports import throughput decreased by 4.8% year-on-year. October is the fifth month in which the performance of West Coast and East Coast ports has been polarized in a row, with the East Coast performing significantly better. Another shipping line, Hapag-Lloyd, announced that its Atlantic Loop 3 service between Northern Europe and the east coast of the United States which had cancelled its call at the Port of Savannah and resumed it. Obviously, the effective operation of ports on the east coast of the United States has given a boost to the recovery of the US supply chain in the past five consecutive months. However, economic analysis points out that the east and west ports of the United States will be able to escape the congestion crisis after about mid-2022.

In Europe, the supply chain is quietly changing due to the lack of container ships leading to insufficient capacity and shortage of raw materials. This has an increasing impact on world trade. More than half of German companies face supply chain and logistics problems. The response of many companies is to find new suppliers or move production locations. But compared to large enterprises, this has caused even greater difficulties for small and medium-sized enterprises. About 20% of the output of small and medium-sized enterprises fell due to the shutdown caused by the pandemic. The reasons behind these problems are the seriously short of containers and insufficient shipping capacity and production stagnation. As far as the impact is concerned, Germany goods will be decreased the market share in China because the imports hard to German products that easy like before. But Eastern Europe will benefit from the trend of diversifying supply chains or shortening transportation routes. The pandemic and supply chain disconnection have changed the industrial ecology of Europe and China at the same time.

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