Blank sailings

 

If they realize there aren’t enough bookings to justify a container ship running its standard route, the company will “blank” the sailing, combining the goods that were supposed to be on that ship with those traveling later in the week.

This is normal shipping stuff. But not this month. As the effects of President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on foreign goods—and the trade war they’ve ignited—set in, many shippers who usually send goods across the Pacific Ocean have paused or canceled their shipments. Data from the supply-chain research firm Sea-Intelligence shows that blank sailings to the US’s West Coast spiked 13 percent this week, and is due to jump to 28 percent the week after. The Port of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest, expects 17 total blank sailings in May, which means the port will lose 224,000 “twenty-foot equivalent units of capacity,” the standard metric used to measure the contents in one container. In total, the port’s data shows, import volumes will be down 31 percent next week compared to the same week last year.

That means a lot of stuff once bound for the US is no longer coming—and an especially lot of that stuff is from China. This is the unusual part. “This is very extreme,” says Simon Heaney, the senior manager of container research at Drewry, a maritime research and advisory firm. “It’s unprecedented in the history of containerization.” The blank sailings, he says, are “an early canary in the coal mine."

  Wired