Forecasted Blank Sailings Add to Asia Golden Week Concerns

With Golden Week looming, some carriers have announced that they will blank sailings, compounding an already highly pressured situation in the Asia shipping industry.

The latest announcement from shipping lines amasses additional pressure on the already strained region, having seen disruption from Typhoon Chanthu in parallel with a surge in COVID cases across the Fujian province affecting some of China’s key ports.

With closures to Ningbo and Shanghai due to the typhoon, and COVID disruption/closures to Quanzhou City and Xiamen ports, blank sailings were put in place to increase schedule reliability, although with the current backlogs this may further aggravate the situation.

This will make shipping from Asia more difficult in Q4, particularly as we start to see an increase in trade ahead of Christmas. Many tradelines have in fact seen slidings as opposed to blankings on their schedules, meaning that voyage numbers have been adjusted to match the realistic departure weeks of vessels in order to visually enhance the schedule integrity.

We will continue to work on your behalf to minimise any disruption to your Asia supply chains and would urge any businesses concerned to contact us for more information. 

For more information or to contact our expert teams to discuss how to minimise the impact on you and your clients, please reach out to us here