3 million TEUs to be taken out on Asia-Europe and Transpacific: Sea-Intelligence

April 14, 2020: The container shipping research agency, Sea-Intelligence has released its report on the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on ocean cargo between Asia-Europe and transpacific, which notes that three million Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) will be taken out on these routes combined.

As of April 11, 384 sailings are now blanked due to the pandemic. During the past week the carriers announced an additional 83 blank sailings on various deep-sea trades.

The number last week was 212 blank sailings due to the pandemic, but at the same time there had previously been 89 blank sailings during the outbreak in China. As the outbreak has developed, it no longer makes sense to separate the impact seen from the virus in China from the impact seen in the rest of the world. Hence the count of blank sailings now includes both the early blank sailings in China and the newer blank sailings from the global spread.

“On Asia-Europe and Transpacific combined, the carriers have now removed 3 million TEU of capacity. To put this into perspective, this equals 2.4 times the normal removal seen during Chinese New Year. This can be seen in figure, which shows the amount of capacity blanked, which had been announced or scheduled in each week, for the combined Asia-Europe and Transpacific trades since week 8. The green static line shows the level of capacity that was removed in relation to Chinese New Year in 2020,” said Alan Murphy, CEO, Sea-Intelligence.

As it is well-known how much demand declines each year due to Chinese New Year, it is possible to also estimate the demand impact from the pandemic outbreak. The blank sailings must be seen as the carriers’ reaction to an actual demand decline. Comparing the pandemic blank sailings to the Chinese New Year blank sailings it can be seen that we are currently facing a demand decline of roughly 6.4 million TEU globally.

If the world returns fully to normal after the 2nd quarter and the carriers do not cancel any further sailings – which appears quite unlikely - this would still lead to a demand decline for full year 2020 of 4 percent.