Container shipping prices continue to fall, with major shipping lines canceling voyages

The container shipping rates continued to drop in October due to reducing demand. The SCFI (Shanghai Containerized Freight Index) has continuously declined for 17 consecutive weeks due to which shipping lines are discontinuing services or canceling voyages. Even though the container prices dropped since the start of 2022, they began a continuous fall in July and the decline increased in September also. In Oct 2022, the decline fell to 2072 points down to 10.4% week-on-week and around 60% of early 2022.

This decline also varied for different routes. The 40-foot container rate from Shanghai to the West Coast of North America dropped the highest from $8117 in February to $2097 which witnessed an 80% drop. Similarly, the standard box price rate to Europe from Shanghai dropped from $7797 to $2581, nearly a 70% drop.

According to Drewry, from Sept 19 to Oct 23, around 122 sailings have been canceled that had scheduled sailings on major trans-pacific, trans-Atlantic, Asia-north Europe, and Asia-Mediterranean routes and it has been canceled by the world’s three largest alliances.

The experts are analyzing that this drop is due to the pandemic when the supply chain was broken under the lockdown influence and ports were jammed with containers that could not be shipped out. Even some middlemen made money by selling a China-US slot during the peak season, which is also a factor that increased freight rates.