Small yet significant rises in European import and export activity, combined with increased Far East imports and continued growth in US exports has fuelled a moderate improvement in long-term global container rates in March 2019. The trend, identified in the latest XSI® Public Indices report from Xeneta, builds on the positive rates development recorded last month, which effectively halted a decline underway since August 2018, informed a release.
Oslo-based Xeneta, the leading ocean freight rate benchmarking and market analytics platform, produces the monthly XSI® based on crowd-sourced rates data from the world’s foremost shippers and freight forwarders. This exclusive data covers over 160,000 port-to-port pairings, with 110 million data points, enabling the report to deliver unique insights into the very latest global freight rate developments.
Says Xeneta CEO, Mr Patrik Berglund: “This month’s XSI® Public Indices report appears to demonstrate the uplift the industry saw in February was not an anomaly… After a prolonged period of downward pressure on long-term rates, they rose by 2.5 per cent last month and a further 0.5 per cent in March. Now those figures may not be big, but, after such a sustained decline, they are certainly significant.
“Because of the highly unpredictable nature of freight rate development— allied to ongoing concerns over Brexit, geopolitics and the issue of fluctuating demand—it’s impossible to say if that upward momentum can be maintained through April and beyond. However, it is positive, especially for selected regions and trade corridors.”
Viewing the industry as a whole, XSI® data shows a 0.6 per cent rates rise for the year-to-date, with the gains of the last two months only just offsetting January’s decline. The US export indicator rose 1.6 per cent month-on-month, taking the index to its highest point since July 2017 (up 8.6 per cent since the start of the year), while the import benchmark fell 0.5 per cent.
Europe experienced a rise in both import and export rates, with exports up 1.4 per cent while imports crept up by just 0.1 per cent. The Far East import benchmark recorded strong growth of 2 per cent, but exports dropped 0.5 per cent—the fourth straight month of rate declines. Despite this, the export index remains robust, at 0.4 per cent up year-on-year, the release elaborated.
Mr Berglund advises all relevant stakeholders to stay abreast of the latest market intelligence, with the complexity of factors driving developments only likely to increase.
