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Opinion
David Fickling

Get Ready for Years of Chaos in Container Shipping

Backed up ports and the Suez Canal fiasco are just surface problems. When things go wrong in this business, they go seriously wrong.

Turning an industry this big around will take a while.

Turning an industry this big around will take a while.

Photograph: Bloomberg

The world’s cargo ships just can’t seem to get their act together.

First there were the queues at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which left as many as 40 container vessels awaiting a berth in early February amid a flood of traffic. Combined volumes at the terminals hit a record of 1.9 million containers in May, nearly double the Covid-19 low in March 2020.