Port congestion should ease next year as new container vessels are delivered and demand from shippers softens from pandemic highs, but not enough to restore global supply-chain flows to where they were before Covid, according to the head of DHL’s freight-forwarding unit, Bloomberg News reported. “It’s going to ease in 2023, but it’s not going to go back to 2019,” DHL Global Forwarding, Freight Chief Executive Officer Tim Scharwath said in an interview Wednesday. “I don’t think we’re going to go back to this overcapacity situation where rates were very low. Infrastructure, especially in the U.S., isn’t going to get better overnight, because infrastructure developments take a long time.” Coronavirus outbreaks and related restrictions led to a shortage of workers and truckers at several major ports around the world last year, slowing the movement of goods in and out of freight hubs and pushing container shipping rates to record highs. Spot prices to Los Angeles from China jumped more than eightfold to as high as $12,424 in September from the end of 2019. While the situation has eased in most places as workers return, further stress on the supply chain could materialize as the key port of Shanghai tentatively emerges from a two-month lockdown and cargo backlogs there are cleared. “The Shanghai situation was like a clog in a pipe,” Scharwath said. The city is “smart to open up slowly to make sure that this clog goes out piece by piece and bit by bit to get the flow running.”
