Yantian port congestion surpasses the Suez Canal blockage in terms of boxes blocked

Posted in Ports by Tanja Lohrmann

Jun 11, 2021 at 07:27.

The container blockage at the port of Yantian continues and the situation is taking a turn for the worse with the effects of the blockage spilling over to nearby ports, Shekou and Nansha.

The blockage has persisted for over two weeks now. Shipping analyst and CEO of Vespucci Maritime, Lars Jensen has stated that the congestion at the Yantian port has already blocked a greater number of containers than those that were blocked due to the infamous Suez Canal blockage by the ship Ever Given.

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To substantiate his claim Mr. Jensen goes on to state at his LinkedIn Post that the Suez Canal blockage impacted a daily flow of over 55000 TEU’s for six days, an overall quantity of 330,000 TEU’s. The Yantian port has been unable to handle daily traffic of almost 25,000 TEU’s. Over 14 days this has amounted to 357,000 TEU’s. In addition to this, the blockage has not been resolved and the effects are spilling over to neighboring ports. Even when the crisis is resolved we will see the effects of a surge of cargo. The carryover effect of this surge will cause potential congestion at destinations with a lag time of about 2 to 5 weeks.

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The situation currently shows no signs of improvement, as the yard density at the port of Yantian remains elevated, and considerable inland traffic jams are causing a shortage of trucking capacity. Stevan Holmquist, MD of Norman Global logistics Hong Kong stated that the pandemic control efforts and the cargo congestions are causing logistics delays across the entire region.

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According to AIS data from FleetMon, there are 36 vessels that are reporting Yantian as the destination. 33 of these ships are cargo ships. As a consequence, shipping lines are moving to omit Yantian port. Lars Jensen also stated that Hapag Lloyd’s planned list of omissions of Yantian port over the next few weeks had grown by over 4 times to a number of 16 compared to only 4 omissions, which had been the case only a few days ago.

Have a look at Yantian Port using FleetMon Explorer: