I think ocean pricing surprised all of us in 2021. I predicted we would continue to see the price of ocean cargo increase, but I don’t know anyone that could have guessed it to rise to the extent that it did. At the end of 2020, we saw prices for 40’ containers from Asia to the U.S. jump to $3K-4K. This was more than double the price we were seeing in July of 2020. In 2021, prices increased to more than $20K per container, multiple times, in the second half of the year.
I did get one prediction correct regarding the TEU volume at Long Beach. I expected that they could break 900K TEU’s in a single month and they were able to do just that in May. Unfortunately, even with unprecedented demand, they were not able to increase capacity in the second half of 2021. This is because of all the different factors from steamships, available containers, port availability, chassis pools, trucking capacity, receiving appointments, and transload availability that must move in unison to increase container throughput.
For 2022, COVID will remain a variable for ocean shipping. With China’s “zero COVID” policy (shutting down entire cities and ports for a small number of cases), it could lead to more port closures. As new variants of the virus emerge, they potentially will increase consumer purchasing patterns, keeping the freight rates at higher than normal. I expect pricing to remain above pre-pandemic averages, but by the second half of year, we should see some new capacity come onto the market and lead us away from transpacific costs above the $15K price.