Although the Lunar New Year holiday ended weeks ago, not all truck drivers in Shenzhen are back to work. On the expressway heading towards Yantian International Container Terminal, several trucks with no containers on their long trailers can be seen parked on the roadside, part of a static convoy that stretches nearly a kilometer. “These are only a small portion of all the empty trucks. The rest had to be parked in Dongguan,” said a driver surnamed Huang, referring to another city in Guangdong that is an hour drive away from Yantian – one of the biggest Chinese container ports for foreign trade. He said the port has more than 15,000 registered truck drivers, but only around 2,000 of them now have work. “I feel that this year’s export market will be the worst,” he said. “I just heard from many factory bosses saying that their electronic products can’t be exported, as their foreign clients haven’t placed orders, and lots of factories have already moved to Southeast Asia.”
With China still trying to rev up its economic engine after three arduous years under the zero-Covid policy, the export sector – which was the main economic driver during the pandemic – is looking like it will continue to sputter amid dwindling external demand and rising geopolitical tensions, according to analysts and industry insiders. For many truck drivers, the sluggish scene at Yantian is in stark contrast to the situation two years ago. In 2021, an empty shipping container was very hard to get, as there was so much cargo to send. But now, containers are gathering dust as they occupy every available space around the port. “In previous years, there were no empty containers at this place,” said another driver who gave his name as Xu, pointing to a space outside Yantian’s automatic toll gate, where empty containers are piled as many as seven high, forming multicolored stacks of corrugated steel. “The boxes have accumulated here since the second half of last year. But now they can’t be piled any higher – the stacker crane can reach only seven storeys.” In November, an official statement from the port’s authorities said that the volume of empty containers stored had reached the highest level since March 2020, and that it would soon reach the highest level since the port opened 29 years ago.
With the dry boxes remaining idle, container yards – which make money through cargo loading and unloading – are also struggling. “There is no business,” said the manager of a container yard near the Yantian port, who declined to be named. “Some yards have closed their business.” Container trends are a crucial barometer of economic progress and global trade, and the current market outlook appears bleak, according to Christian Roeloffs, CEO and co-founder of Container xChange, a leading online platform for container logistics. “The falling rates and increased availability of containers in certain regions of the world are indicative of weak demand and slower economic growth,” Roeloffs said.
Container leasing and purchasing prices in major ports across Asia, such as Ningbo, Shanghai and Singapore, have fallen sharply in the past year, indicating that the current situation may persist in the foreseeable future, he added. According to a report this month by maritime research consultancy Drewry, the price for a 40-foot container in December was 45% lower than during the same time in 2021. The report estimated that prices would continue to fall for the first six to nine months of 2023, before recovering, the South China Morning Post reports.
