With a price increase of nearly 10 times, foreign trade enterprises are "hard to find a box", but foreign ports have piled up tens of thousands of empty boxes!

Affected by the epidemic situation and the Suez Canal Blocking incident, since last year, the global shipping industry has been facing a situation of hard to get one container. The composite index of container freight rate has reached a record high, reaching 2216.63 points, three or four times of that before the epidemic.

Nowadays, the global shipping industry can be described as "two days of ice and fire". The epidemic situation in overseas countries is severe, the manpower is insufficient, and the port containers are piled up like a mountain; The major ports in Asia are busy with transportation, but they are often plagued by "lack of containers" and "lack of containers". Container prices have soared, and some shipping routes have risen nearly 10 times. It is still "hard to find one container".

However, it is difficult to find one container in China. In Auckland port of New Zealand, there is a serious backlog of empty containers. Since the second half of 2020, in order to store those empty containers that cannot be transported, they have found five new storage yards.

In addition, data show that 10000 to 15000 containers are stranded in California; In the UK's felixto port, containers have spread from the port to the surrounding suburbs; The number of empty containers in Australian ports exceeds 50000.

At present, the stock of empty containers in some important international ports is three times the normal level.

Causes of empty tank supply pressure，There are several obvious reasons，The largest inventory rebuilding operation in American economic history;Covid-19 causes many containers to pile up and shelve at the port;In addition, another reason is that China's container manufacturing plants were temporarily closed from April to June 2020 due to the outbreak of the epidemic. Generally speaking, 3.5-4 million new 20teu containers will enter the logistics system every year, and the loss in the first quarter of plant closure is 1 million TEU.

It is reported that at present, the global container capacity of 20teu is estimated to be 50 million, which means that the gap is up to 2%. Combined with the above 10% additional demand, the supply gap of containers is 12%.

Dpworld said that the current problem is very serious and could lead to collapse effect at any time.A box of hard to find, derived from the mysterious organization "empty box cattle""My friend, what about empty boxes? 1000. "

The word "cattle" must be familiar to everyone, whether it is Spring Festival train tickets or concert tickets, it can be said that where there is demand, there is cattle. The "empty box scalpers" are those who take advantage of the owner's psychology to obtain empty boxes through illegal means and sell them at a high price.

Where does the cattle box come from? In one case, empty containers are presented from the shipping company through false presentation of the bill of lading and then sold; The other is to "cheat" on the empty container reservation system inside the terminal and "hide" the empty containers. The reason why scalpers are so "powerful" is that they must have woven a strong "network" between shipping companies and docks.

According to a number of media reports, some scalpers take the opportunity to sit on the ground to start prices, and some routes may not be able to grab a container by adding $3000.

Now, in addition to the relevant policies issued by the government to increase the route capacity and ensure the return of empty containers, shipping companies have also made relevant efforts. For example, the trade wind shipping order forbids employees to interfere with the flow direction of empty containers, and COSCO Shipping prevents scalpers from "cheating" empty containers through false invoices by stipulating that the destination chosen during booking is not allowed to be changed midway.

Under such circumstances, what we need to do at present is to further strengthen the overall management of containers and accelerate the transportation of containers back to China. Only in this way can we further alleviate the problem of China's ocean shipping.

For shippers, they should boycott this behavior of breaking the market rules. Once they acquiesce in this behavior, it is bound to encourage more and more people to take risks for their interests.

The current prosperity of the shipping industry reflects the disadvantages of the industry. What we should do is not acquiesce and connive. After all, there is no winner after the shooting.