Important notice to trade
The difficult conditions we have been working in over the last 8 months in regards to vessel shortages, equipment availability and incredibly high freight rates, unfortunately, has steadily worsened throughout the month of June. Demand for containers from China is at a record high, coupled with Carriers still working with reduced Vessel capacity means that there are simply not enough empty containers arriving back into the Country to fulfil current demand. So inevitably vessels are being overbooked, and the carriers are having to create waitlists, roll pools or as we are currently experiencing not accepting any further bookings for Vessels due to depart in June.
Compounding the issue is the fact Yantian port had to close due to an outbreak of Covid-19 in late May. Operations did resume after a few days, however, despite this, they are only operating at 45% of their usual capacity, due to the increase of safety measures in order to control the virus outbreak. We were informed by one of the Carriers this morning that approx. 79 vessels will be omitting Yantian port in an attempt to protect schedule reliability. We have been advised to expect further delays of up to 16 days from Yantian port, which will ultimately affect other Chinese ports & we have already seen evidence of this.
Our advice to customers would be to send your bookings through 3-4 weeks before the cargo ready date in order to give us the best chance at securing vessel space. Just as a reminder the current process is when a booking is received by our partners, they send booking requests to all of the Carriers we work with and wait for confirmation of booking and availability. Due to the volume of bookings, the Carriers are receiving this process is now taking days rather than hours however as we have several agents in China that we work with we are confident we will be able to find a suitable option for you.
But and we must stress the importance of this, when these vessel options are provided, we only have a very narrow window in which to respond. Therefore we strongly recommend that you get back to your Account Managers within 1 – 2 hours wherever possible. This gives the very best chance in securing a booking, as we know anything outside this means we cannot guarantee this will be still available and may even create longer delays. We realise that if this then crosses into the following month we may not have rates available to quote but we recommend you secure your booking first. We will advise you ASAP when new rates become available. You can be assured we will keep you advised throughout the process the but key factor currently is securing your booking.
In light of the above information, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers for their support during these extraordinary and unprecedented times.
If you have any questions or require any further information regarding our notice to trade, please get in touch with your local Account Manager on +44 0113 271 1555, info@carrycargo.com or your account managers direct email address for further updates and information.
