Maersk: Ready To Say Goodbye To Record During The First Half Of Gao Yunjia, Reduce The Requirement Of The Spring Festival Heave To Guarantee Service | The Shipping

"The first half of the year is likely to cool down.Whether it's in February, April or May, we don't know, so we're going to keep working where we are or start adjusting when things get back to normal."

Before Christmas, the chief executive of Maersk's rival Herberot predicted that strong markets and high rates would continue into the second quarter.

Maersk is less sure, with Vincent Clerc arguing that the normalisation of the market in particular depends on how quickly the global economy reopens and how quickly consumers can return to their old spending patterns.We have to be prepared to act effectively. If it cools down next week or three months from now, we have to be prepared to go with the flow.We can't control it,"

Vincent Clerc also said "there are not enough containers"

In addition to record high rates, the container market is now facing a severe shortage of containers to move goods around the world, frustrating shippers and freight forwarders.He says this is happening because demand in the third and fourth quarters of last year was "huge", meaning there are not enough containers in the world to meet the demand we are seeing today,

"It's not because the containersare stacked in the wrong places," he said.Now all the ships that can sail are at sea, and all the containers that can carry goods are carried on the ships.The leasing company has no containers in stock.We have leased, manufactured and ordered them.

Maersk's chief commercial officer said it was surprising that the situation had not changed, whether the economy was closed or open, so there would still be pressure in the coming weeks.Then we'll see after the Chinese New Year, we start to get some customer orders again with estimates."

Recently, large areas of Europe, including Denmark, where Maersk is based, were affected by a new blockade after a new variant of the coronavirus spread from the UK.However, Maersk has yet to feel any impact from the new blockade, saying that so far we have seen nothing.We don't know if the third lockdown will be extended to a higher level because people are spending more time at home, shopping at Amazon and Zalando, or if it will be shortened because the economy is struggling.It's hard to predict."

He said.Traditionally, container liners have more flights grounded ahead of the Chinese New Year, but that will not be the case this year as there are so few flights grounded, Vincent Clerc said. "It looks like there is a lot of demand and we have enough demand to load more cargo during the two weeks of the Lunar New Year," he said.Secondly, we need ships to carry containers from the US and Europe back to Asia."

According to monitoring data, only 2% of flights from Asia to the West Coast have been canceled so far, compared to the usual 20% in previous years!It's expected this spring.

So far this Spring Festival, the forecast is for only a 1.2 percent decline in capacity on the West-U.S. route.On the east coast of Asia, the decline was only 3.6 per cent.This is in sharp contrast to the average drop of 20.4 percent and 19.2 percent from 2016 to 2019, respectively.