Container throughput in Hong Kong and Shenzhen slumped last month, with industry experts predicting tougher times ahead amid shrinking global demand.
Hong Kong port's container throughput fell 23.2 percent last month from a year ago to 1.622 million TEUs, the South China Morning Post reported.
Shenzhen port's throughput fell 17.5 percent to 1.526 million TEUs, the worst monthly drop on record.
Although last month's decline in Hong Kong was smaller than the 24.1 percent drop in December, last month should have been bolstered by the traditional cargo rush before the Lunar New Year, said Sunny Ho Lap-kee, the executive director of the Hong Kong Shippers' Council.
"February and March will be a lot worse than January. We'll be lucky if February's throughput[in Hong Kong is a third of January's," Ho said.
Typically, throughput would fall more than 60 percent in the month following the Lunar New Year from the previous month, he said. He also predicted throughput in Shenzhen would worsen to a 25 percent decline this month from a year earlier.
"Factories have not started production yet. There are virtually no orders," Ho said.
Because of the lack of orders, many workers who went home for the Lunar New Year have put off returning to the factories in the Pearl River Delta until next month or later.
Charles de Trenck, an analyst at Transport Trackers, said last month's Hong Kong figure was worse than his forecast of a percentage decline in the mid-teens.
"The November to January drop, with not much hope for February, is the worst performance of Hong Kong's container throughput since the early 1990s, worse than the Asian financial crisis," de Trenck said.
Meanwhile, Singapore, the world's busiest container port, suffered an estimated 19.6 percent year-on-year decline in container throughput to 1.97 million TEUs.
The decline is Singapore's worst since the 1990s, even worse than in 2001, when Maersk, a major international shipping line, pulled out of Singapore. |
