European ports including Rotterdam and Hamburg say the Japanese earthquake will begin to affect volumes later this month as dockside stockpiles are depleted and ships that left Tokyo soon after the disaster arrive in harbor.
A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S, the world’s largest container line, has a transit time of 31 days between Yokohama and Rotterdam, Europe’s No. 1 port, so that vessels which left Japan the day after the March 11 quake would dock on April 11. Wilh. Wilhelmsen ASA’s car transporters take six weeks to complete the journey via Australia, indicating an arrival date of April 22.
“We haven’t reduced capacity or the number of port calls, but volumes have dropped moderately and we’re receiving fewer bookings,” Jens Eskelund, Copenhagen-based Maersk’s spokesman for North Asia, said yesterday in a phone interview. “There’ll be a delay before that moves through the export system.”
Cargo volumes may hold up even after ships start to arrive in Europe as Japanese companies tap inventories to meet export demand, then will decline when reduced production depletes stocks. That may lead to lighter loads, quieter ports and manufacturers running short of auto-parts and electronics, the biggest classes of container goods carried from Japan.
Pacific Ocean crossings are shorter than routes from Asia to Europe, with the trip from Tokyo to Los Angeles taking 12 days, according to the website of Marseille, France-based CMA CGM SA, the world’s third-largest container shipper.
Factory Disruption
Japan handles about 4 percent of the world’s containers and prior to the earthquake and tsunami almost 20 percent of the global fleet by box capacity was timetabled to call there, according to Clarkson Plc, the world’s biggest shipbroker.
The disaster has disrupted factories and transport infrastructure in the north of Japan, reducing production and making it tougher to get goods to port, while damage to nuclear facilities has led to widespread power shortages. Fujitsu Ltd. has shuttered one of its semiconductor plants until April 3.
Japan’s manufacturing deteriorated at the fastest pace in at least nine years in March, a report from Japan Materials Management Association and Markit Economics showed yesterday, underscoring forecasts for the economy to shrink in the aftermath of the earthquake.
“This could have an impact on trade volumes,” Clarkson said in an e-mail to Bloomberg on March 25. “Japan is a key exporter on the main shipping lanes and some portion of the economy’s ability to output export goods has no doubt been affected.”
Hamburg Concern
While Rotterdam has experienced no drop in volumes as yet, a decline is “not unlikely,” spokesman Minco van Heezen said. The Dutch complex imports 1.9 million metric tons of Japanese cargo a year -- compared with 12.9 million tons from China -- including 1.6 million tons of container goods such as electronics, parts and chemicals, and imports 100,000 cars.
At the port of Hamburg, Germany’s largest, “a decline is possible and could happen in coming months,” spokesman Bengt van Beuningen said, adding that forecasts aren’t yet available. All vessels arriving from Japan in Felixstowe, the biggest U.K. port, were also loaded before the events of March 11 and it’s too early to gauge the outcome, spokesman Paul Davey said.
Ports including Rotterdam, Felixstowe and Bremerhaven, Germany’s second-largest container dock, said any fall-off they do suffer is likely to have a limited impact on total volumes, with Bremerhaven expecting a “little decline” in Japanese cargo, according to spokesman Jan Janssen.
Beverages, Plastics
Hapag-Lloyd AG, the world’s fourth-biggest container line, said its ships need 34 days to travel from Japan to Hamburg, where it is based. The earthquake’s impact on cargoes of wood products, machinery, raw materials, foodstuffs, beverages, chemicals and plastics from the Asian country “remains to been seen,” according to Eva Gjersvik, a company spokeswoman.
Car shipments to Europe will probably one direct casualty of the disruption caused by the quake, said Benedicte Gude, a spokeswoman for Lysaker, Norway-based Wilh. Wilhelmsen, which describes Japan as among its “most important” flows.
“In the short term we expect export volumes out of Japan to be negatively affected,” Gude said by telephone. “In the medium and long term, it’s still uncertain.”
Lost Production
Wilhelmsen ships cars for companies including Toyota Motor Corp., which says it may have lost production of about 140,000 vehicles from March 14 to March 26. Honda Motor Co. estimates output will be cut by 46,600 autos between March 14 and April 3, and Daihatsu Motor Co. closed two factories at a cost of an estimated 35,000 units through March 29.
“Current production is using inventories and we are able to produce cars at the Tsutsumi plant in Aichi and at our factory in Kyushu until April 8,” Toyota spokeswoman Shiori Hashimoto said. “We don’t have information beyond that at this point.”
The quake is also likely to hurt sales and earnings at European auto-parts companies in the second quarter, according to Rainer Neidnig, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service who predicted in a March 30 note that it will take “some time” for supply chains to be realigned to cope with shortages.
Grammer AG (GMM), a car-seat maker based in Amberg, Germany, said in a statement this week that a lack of parts following the disaster may prompt carmakers to slow production and lead to the cancellation of contracts with suppliers.
Hapag Return
All of the world’s top six container shippers are once again accepting bookings for the Tokyo area after Hapag-Lloyd said yesterday it would start calling there again in about 10 days. Hapag has diverted ships further south because of concern about threats to equipment and crew from the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, 220 miles north of the Japanese capital.
Vessels are continuing to avoid a 30-kilometer (19 mile) no-go area around the Fukushima site as instructed by the Japanese government, and many have adopted larger, self-imposed exclusion zones to avoid off-shore debris from the tsunami.
Maersk spokesman Michael Storgaard in Copenhagen said the company is hopeful that any slump in volumes will be followed by a strong rebound led by items needed in the rebuilding effort.
“Japan’s exports are clearly impacted, but there is also a reconstruction period which will entail increased imports,” he said. “The overall shipping balance between these two trends can’t be assessed exactly at this point.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment