Container freight rates remain high, foreign trade companies' orders are cold



        Since last year, global container freight rates have continued to rise, and the quotations in the container market on some routes have skyrocketed to more than ten times. Yiwu, Zhejiang, is an important center of my country's export of foreign trade products. Every year, a large number of foreign merchants come here to purchase. The drastic changes in container freight rates also have a huge impact on Yiwu's export of goods.


  Zhejiang Yiwu: container freight rates remain high, foreign trade companies' orders are cold


         Container freight rates are rising, and the most impacted are low value-added products. Because of the small profit margins, these products cannot withstand excessively high freight rates. Therefore, many overseas buyers suspend their orders and postpone orders for some low-value products. Or refuse to accept the goods. According to a manufacturer of home improvement products, there was a batch of orders for April this year, which were originally planned to be delivered in June, but they were still stuck in the warehouse in November.


   Not only that, because of the epidemic, many international merchants are inconvenient to travel, and the passenger flow in the trade city is also not as good as before. This has led to a significant decline in the order volume of many stores this year.


   Zhang Ping, general manager of a decoration company in Yiwu, Zhejiang: Before the epidemic, we had an output value of more than 3 million yuan a month, and now it is 700,000 yuan to 800,000 yuan. The main reason is that customers can't get in.


  Zhejiang Yiwu: Difficult to find space, serious backlog in commodity warehouses


  Container freight rates remain high, and the main reason is that the supply of space exceeds demand. The high freight has caused overseas buyers to reduce their enthusiasm for placing orders and even temporarily reject orders. In this case, many small commodity companies in Yiwu, Zhejiang have a serious backlog, and the company's cash flow is deteriorating.


   In a warehouse for export commodities in Yiwu, Zhejiang, the warehouse of more than 6,000 square meters is almost full of goods, but in sharp contrast, there are very few container trucks here. It is understood that this is almost every day during this period, so a lot of goods have to be backlogged in the warehouse.


   Su Xiaofeng is the person in charge of a freight forwarding company. He introduced that this warehouse can store 120 containers of goods, but recently there are only a few containers that are loaded each day. Under normal circumstances, it only takes 3 days for the goods to enter the warehouse, but now many goods in the warehouse have been stored for more than 10 days, and some have even been backlogged for a month or two.


  Su Xiaofeng, General Manager of a Supply Chain Management Co., Ltd. in Zhejiang: We can't get down to our space, or there are no containers in the terminal. We have ample supply, but the boxes cannot be returned in many countries with severe epidemics, resulting in very few boxes in the yard.


   At another sanitary products company, Liu Junming, the person in charge, showed reporters a full warehouse of goods. Because space was not booked, a large number of goods originally planned to be exported could only be temporarily stacked in the product exhibition hall. According to statistics, their company's product turnover rate has been extended from 42 days to 58 days, and the company's cash flow is under pressure.


  Some companies adjust their business strategies Expert: High container freight rates will gradually fall


  Many foreign trade companies said that the lack of space is still very serious. Sometimes in order to ship in time, we have to entrust freight forwarders to increase the price of space. Therefore, the actual container quotations on the market are generally higher than the official quotations.


   In order to avoid the risks caused by lack of cabinets and excessively high freight rates, many companies have also adjusted their response strategies, such as expanding the proportion of domestic sales, or changing the sales model of external exports to pre-sales and extending the delivery period.


   It is understood that in late September this year, the container market quotations fell slightly after experiencing a continuous rise for nearly a year. According to expert analysis, there is still a large backlog of orders in China, and the loading rate of container ships is still at a high level. Therefore, the freight rate is unlikely to fluctuate sharply in the short term. However, on the other hand, the margin of supply and demand of containers has eased, and in the future, we need to be alert to the risk of freight rate diving caused by the decline in loading rate.


         Yan Hai, chief analyst of Shenwan Hongyuan Securities Transportation Logistics: Now the entire supply and demand are still in a very tight process, but the degree of tension has become more and more tense from the past, and now it has tended to ease. It should be a process of gradual decline.