Recently, the China Shipowners Association and the China Port Association, together with major liner companies and port enterprises, released the Joint Initiative on Smooth International Logistics Services and Stable Foreign Trade, aiming to promote cooperation between port and shipping enterprises and import and export enterprises, and ensure the transportation needs of China's import and export goods.
The initiative proposes six measures: "optimizing transportation capacity to meet the needs of foreign trade transportation", "taking multiple measures to enhance the capacity of empty container protection", "strengthening cooperation to smooth the container logistics supply chain", "innovating means to improve service efficiency", "strengthening self-discipline, charging in accordance with the law", "overcoming difficulties and establishing new cooperative relationships", actively overcoming the adverse effects caused by the epidemic and striving to do a good job in ensuring China's foreign trade export transportation.
It is understood that, as China has made major strategic achievements in the prevention and control of the epidemic, and the measures to speed up the resumption of production and stabilize foreign trade have achieved results, the demand for container export transportation has increased significantly. However, due to port congestion, poor collection and distribution system, difficult return flow of empty containers and other reasons caused by the spread of the epidemic abroad, the international container liner capacity and the contradiction between supply and demand of empty containers are prominent, and the freight market is facing a situation of "one cabin and one container are hard to find".
To alleviate the supply-demand contradiction in maritime transportation, departments such as the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Commerce have guided various liner companies to optimize route configuration, increase the supply of Chinese route capacity, and accelerate the return of empty containers. The export volume of foreign trade containers in China exceeded 43 million TEUs in the second half of last year, a year-on-year increase of 9.8%. The number of container spaces and traffic volume of the main ocean routes exported by Chinese Mainland increased significantly year on year. For example, in January 2021, the number of spaces and traffic volume of North American routes increased by more than 40% year on year, and the number of spaces and traffic volume of European routes increased by more than 20% year on year.
