Long-term ocean freight rates slump over 10% in April
The container shipping industry endured a torrid time in April, with global long-term ocean freight rates diving 10.6%, according to the latest data from Oslo’s Xeneta.
A raft of newly negotiated contracts, with prices reflecting the low market demand and high capacity, dragged rates down across the board – with all regional trade lanes registering month-on-month declines. Xeneta’s Shipping Index (XSI), which crowd-sources container rates data to track real-time developments, shows prices have now slumped 13.6% in 2023 alone.
“This is now the eighth consecutive month of falls and, at over 10%, certainly one of the most noteworthy,” comments Xeneta CEO Patrik Berglund. “This demonstrates, as explained at the time, that March’s dip of just 0.5% was somewhat misleading. It was basically the quiet before the storm as new contracts, at significantly lower prices, were waiting to take effect in April. We can now see the dramatic impact of that.”
He continues: “The carriers are in a tight spot, with global economic and geopolitical factors hitting demand and putting shippers in the driving seat when it comes to long-term negotiations. That said, year-on-year rates are still 5% up. But, to demonstrate the sea change in market sentiment here, they were up a huge 118.5% between April 2021 and April 2022. So, given the fact that fundamentals remain weak, it looks unlikely that year-on-year growth will be maintained much longer. We can very likely expect further falls ahead.”
In Europe, the import XSI registered its largest ever decline, with long-term rates falling by 19.5% month-on-month. Both inbound and outbound container volumes for the region have dried up in 2023, with outbound falling 10%, while inbound volumes sank 9.1% in the first two months alone (February saw the lowest import volumes in three years for the trade).
The Far East export sub-index dropped 10% from March, having now shed 18.2% of its value since the start of the year.
Far East import rates also slipped through April, with the backhaul sub-index ending the month 15.5% down.
The import XSI in the US saw the smallest month-on-month decrease of all the regional sub-indices, dipping by 1.5%.
The XSI for US exports saw the largest month-on-month drop of all the sub-indices, collapsing 18.9%. This is now the trade with the lowest levels of increase since January 2017.
Xeneta is the leading ocean and air freight rate benchmarking and market intelligence platform transforming the shipping and logistics industry. Xeneta’s powerful reporting and analytics platform provides liner-shipping stakeholders the data they need to understand current and historical market behavior – reporting live on market average and low/high movements for both short and long-term contracts. Xeneta’s data is comprised of over 300 million contracted container and air freight rates and covers over 160,000 global ocean trade routes and over 40,000 airport-airport connections. Xeneta is a privately held company with headquarters in Oslo, Norway and regional offices in New York and Hamburg.
