Container Shortages hamper US Exports

Tim Aeppel of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article that pretty well captured the difficulties American exporters face when trying to get ocean containers.  The dollar is weak, making US products highly affordable. Unfortunately, US exporters are having a pretty hard time getting access to empty ocean containers.  This is is a particular issue in the US Midwest, where agricultural commodities come from.

Food products and especially refrigerated goods are suffering with this issue.  However other specialized equipment types also are being priced at a premium.  I recently quoted on the use of a 40 ft open top container from Montreal to the Middle East.  The surcharge for the special equipment container type was 1000 dollars MORE than the ocean freight.

US exporters should be benefiting from the extra buying power that foreign consumers enjoy at the moment.  However, ocean carrier need to re-balance trades by moving empty containers to more profitable trades complicates the situation.   Having spent many years in the container shipping business, I am used to seeing "container mountains" in New Jersey and other excess capacity regions when the majority of trade was inbound from Asia.   Now that the US export trades are booming, its darned hard to get an empty box when you need one. Carriers used to provide very aggressive rates on exports if you could pick up a container in Memphis or St. Louis.  Not any more. 

APL introduced 53 foot ocean containers in the last few months.  I'd love to know what backhaul freight is going in those boxes nowadays. 

I remember the days when I thought Sea-Land would drop a box in the forest if they thought they could get a load. Thats how abundant their equipment was.   Nowadays, containers, and especially chassis are hard to come by. If you work for a company who sits on containers don't expect any mercy on demurrage!

clipped from www.baltimoresun.com Many U.S. companies hoping to profit from surging exports created by the weak dollar are facing an unexpected hurdle: There aren't enough of the big, metal shipping containers that help form the backbone of the global economy. The shortage is threatening to limit the benefits U.S. producers can reap from one of the few bright spots in an otherwise troubled economy. While housing and financial markets have slumped, many companies have seen a rise in their export business, helping offset the domestic slump and lessening what would have already been a far more painful downturn. Finding enough of the big metal boxes used to be a cinch, because the nation's massive hunger for imports meant they were constantly arriving and stacking up from Long Beach, Calif., to Long Island, N.Y. Shipping companies typically scoured the country for anyone willing to fill outgoing boxes. But with the slump in the value of the dollar making U.S. goods more attractive to foreign buyers and many overseas economies continuing to hum, the tide has shifted in recent months. Shipping containers -- and the way they're handled -- reflect how the U.S. interacts with the global economy, which is one reason the problem has emerged now. For years, the U.S. crafted a trading system that was designed to pull in masses of imported consumers goods such as sneakers and VCRs as efficiently as possible from countries like China. Far less was expected to flow the other way.

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