“Bigger Mess Than Last Year” – Global Supply Chain Crisis Could Emerge By Summer

The next round of supply chain bottlenecks could be even greater than last year’s massive congestion at ports as China’s “zero COVID” policy has shuttered factories and locked down major cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai. A backlog of orders is building, and commercial vessels off China’s top ports are increasing. Once China reopens, a tsunami of container ships will flood global shipping lanes.

Bloomberg provides a good summary of how the global supply chain is going to get slammed (again):

“We expect a bigger mess than last year,” said Jacques Vandermeiren, the chief executive officer of the Port of Antwerp, Europe’s second-busiest for container volume, in an interview. “It will have a negative impact, and a big negative impact, for the whole of 2022.”

Beijing’s zero-tolerance policy will unleash what we’ve been warning for months (read: here & here): a logistical disaster as top ports in the Asian country have slowed to a trickle, leaving empty containers piling and massive amounts of commercial vessels sitting offshore.

Once China reopens, and those vessels begin shipping products worldwide, FreightWaves founder and CEO Craig Fuller warns this will “wreck your summer.”

The Chinese Communist Party is about to wreck your summer. https://t.co/AaKfaS710J

— Craig Fuller 🛩🚛🇺🇦 (@FreightAlley) April 23, 2022

“Once product export activities resume and a large volume of vessels make their way to the U.S. West Coast ports, we expect waiting times to increase significantly,” said Julie Gerdeman, CEO of supply-chain risk analytics firm Everstream Analytics.

This may suggest that Goldman Sachs’ high-frequency weekly supply chain congestion index could reverse after falling for much of the year. If congestion worsens after China reopens, Goldman’s analysts might have to reevaluate their ‘peak supply chain’ call.- READ MORE