(LOS ANGELES) In another sign of how deep the global recession has become, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on Friday reported their worst combined import statistics for September in nine years.
September is often the busiest month at the nation's biggest port complex, making it one of the best barometers of the health of the economy and international trade.
The outlook could hardly be more ominous, said John Husing, an independent analyst with Economics and Politics Inc in Redlands, California.
Seeing nothing but smooth sailing ahead for the globalisation that has reshaped international trade, the world's shipping lines committed themselves years into the future to orders for new container ships that have as much as 69 per cent more cargo carrying capacity than the vessels that were the world's largest in 2004, he said.
Mr Husing described it as 'the worst recession in modern times hitting an industry that was geared for the opposite of what they are facing.
' Through the first half of 2009, each of the world's 17 biggest shipping lines were in the red, according to Paris-based AXS-Alphaliner, which maintains online databases for shipping industry professionals.
Denmark-based APM-Maersk had losses of US$540 million. Cosco Container Lines of China lost US$671 million. Hapag-Lloyd, Germany's biggest container line, lost US$680 million. NYK of Japan posted net losses of US$694 million, AXS- Alphaliner research shows.
Jan Tiedemann, a shipping analyst with AXS-Alphaliner, said that the companies are dealing with less cargo, lower freight rates for the cargo that remains, contractual obligations for new ships they don't need and the inability to rid themselves of older vessels quickly enough by scrapping them to reduce overcapacity.
'No one in the industry is making money,' Mr Tiedemann said. 'Without a doubt, the Southern California ports should be worried,' said Neil Dekker, an analyst at Drewry Shipping Consultants in London who produces container industry forecasts.
'Companies will go bust; freight rates may take years to recover.' Mr Dekker said that shipping lines have been able to increase their freight rates for handling a 40-foot container from less than US$900 during the summer to US$1,450 in September, but he added that 'last September, they would have been able to charge US$2,000 for the same container, so they are not even back to breaking even yet.'
The port of Los Angeles received 309,078 containers packed with imported goods in September, representing a decline of 16 per cent from the same month last year and 27 per cent from September 2006, Los Angeles's best month ever for imports.
Long Beach received 224,924 import containers in September, a drop of 19 per cent from a year earlier and 32 per cent from September 2007, the port's best September ever.
For the first nine months of the year, imports, exports and empty containers through the port of Los Angeles were down 16 per cent at just under five million containers, while the Long Beach port saw a decline of nearly 25 per cent at just under 3.7 million containers, compared with the same period last year.
As dismal as those figures are for the two ports, which rank first and second in the United States in container volume and together rank fifth in the world, a greater worry goes beyond the immediate and substantial loss of local trade-related jobs.
Some of the ports' most important tenants were so poorly positioned for the downturn that they might sink completely in a sea of billions of dollars of red ink, analysts say.
Source : Business Times, 19.10.09.
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