Is there a Relationship between World Inflation and Maritime Transport?

The maritime transport of containers has become almost prohibitive for companies that have to use it due to the uncontrolled increases which, over the course of the year, have caused container prices to rise.

There are Chinese ports such as Yantian in the south of the country, one of the busiest in China, which at the end of May announced, following the local pandemic situation, that it would no longer accept containers, creating an immense congestion of ships all over the world. 'entrance to the port.

Port activities are now slowly returning to normal but around 140 ships are still stuck waiting for authorization to load or unload, with the consequent slowdown of new ones arriving.

After the problem of delays recorded in the Suez Canal in March due to the grounding of a ship, the limited availability of free containers caused prices to grow exponentially, bringing the price of a 40" container on the Shanghai-Rotterdam route to 11,196 UDS, value 7 times higher than a year ago.

The current price level and the extreme length of delivery times for goods are causing serious difficulties for world trade, at a time when a recovery was expected after the most acute phase of the pandemic.

This international situation has a strong impact on the price of goods and, in turn, on the inflation of countries that import products transported by ship . In fact, the Federal Reserve in the United States has increased its inflationary forecasts as incoming goods are significantly more expensive than last year and their availability is lower than demand.

While we appreciate a general drop in the prices of raw materials, after incredible increases in recent months, their cost, with transport included, does not provide any benefit to the end customer.

But the lack of free containers does not depend only on port congestion due to COVID, but also on new rules introduced by the World Maritime Organization which has required all shipping companies to lower the amount of sulfur in fuel oil since January 2020 , bringing it from 3.5% to 0.5%.

This new regulation has led to the scrapping of many old ships and the revamping of others, including container ships, decreasing the fleet in circulation and increasing freight prices.