Air rates out of China have increased more than 400% since January
With a decline of 39% in volumes versus April 2019, it must be one of the worst months in
air cargo’s history“But a greater fall in capacity, mixed with the urgent need for personal protective equipment (PPE) by governments around the world, explains also why current air cargo yields have reportedly gone through the roof.”
Suez Canal Authority Makes Big Cuts in Transit Charges
As low fuel costs make Cape of Good Hope more attractive for ships
Thanks to drastically reduced bunker fuel bills, many of the world's larger ship have started to go around the Cape of Good Hope to pick up more business along the African coast and to avoiding the tolls paid to the Suez Canal Authority - which often tend to be in excess of $500,000 per transit.
In light of this development the Suez Canal Authority has announced significant reductions in its transit fees in order to attract more traffic through its gates.
Ships heading east from North America’s eastern seaboard will get the biggest reduction up to 75%.
Boxships heading for Asia from Algericas, Tangiers and Northern Europe will get 17% discounts. Meanwhile, ships from ports of northwest Europe have been offered a modest 6% cut.
Hapag-Lloyd cutting costs while riding out pandemic
Hapag Lloyd chief executive Rolf Habben Jansen ,speaking generally about how the container shipping industry will weather the Covid-19 impact, he said there were “important differences” to 2008 and 2009, when the container shipping industry entered into “quite a long and difficult period”. He said the industry had an orderbook that was half of the global fleet and this resulted in a “massive imbalance between supply and demand.”
He said “Today that situation is different as the orderbook is a record low and we expect the orderbook to come down even further.”He added “We need to adjust capacity to lower demand, there are quite a lot of sailings being taken out… when the market picks up capacity will come back. Most ships are available and it will be possible to put them back in service quite soon.”
Container shipping blank sailings reaching peak pandemic
The container shipping sector has now reached the peak impact of the COVID-19 in terms of blanked sailings according to analyst Sea Intelligence.
SeaIntel said that last week, week 17, saw the peak of blank sailings on the Asia – North Europe trade with some 38% cancelled. In week 19 the Mediterranean to North America East Coast has 33% blank capacity and Asia to East Coast South America seeing a 59% capacity cut week 20. However, while the weeks in late April – May see the peak in terms of cancelled services there will be a continued impact on the market.
“For Asia-North Europe the market will experience more than 20% capacity withdrawal for 7 consecutive weeks, hereof three weeks in excess of 35%. For both Asia-Mediterranean and Asia-East Coast South America the shippers will have to navigate around 4 weeks where the cancelled capacity exceeds 30%,” said Alan Murphy ceo of SeaIntel.
The large-scale blanking of sailings is also set to cause problems on the backhaul for export volumes and empty container repositioning.
“In the coming 6-8 weeks we could very well see a period where the export cargo and empty flow combined exceeds the total capacity available in the market. Historically this has led the carriers to favour empty container evacuation and curb booking intake with rising freight rates as a result,” Murphy said.
Coronavirus: Russia now has second highest virus case total
Russia has confirmed 232,000 cases of coronavirus - the second highest toll in the world after the US.
In the last 24 hours the country has reported 10,899 infections, the tenth consecutive day that number has been above 10,000.
Among the infected is President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov, local media report.
Brazil's president defiant as coronavirus death toll soars
Grief grips Brazil as deaths from COVID-19 spike sharply but Bolsonaro insists the country must get back to work.
The number of coronavirus infections in Brazil has risen to more than 200,000, while it registered a daily record of 13,944 new cases on Thursday.
But President Jair Bolsonaro continues to push state governors to ease lockdowns and open the economy.
In the region, Argentina is slowly lifting its lockdown but Peru is reeling from a rising number of infections despite imposing movement curbs.
