In the last two days, a screenshot of ships crowded together near the sea area of Shanghai circulated among the Internet. The picture said that “hundreds of ocean going freighters have been stranded in the open sea of Shanghai, and the supply chain is broken here”.
In this regard, the first financial reporter consulted a number of people in the industry and pointed out the “fishy” in the picture: the ships in the picture are all kinds of ship types, including small fishing boats. Many of them only pass through the sea area of Shanghai, and create a “dense” vision by changing the scale. At present, there is no serious congestion at the wharf of Shanghai port, and the number of waiting ships is in single digits.
why the number of berthing ships in Shanghai port is so crowded
The response of Shanghai International Port (Group) Co.Ltd(600018) side received by the reporter today also said: “We have noticed that some media have released false reports about the serious congestion in Shanghai port, which mentioned that ‘the port delay in Shanghai is becoming more and more serious’ and’ the number of ships waiting for loading and unloading in Shanghai port has soared to more than 300 this week ‘and other lack of textual research remarks and attached pictures. According to the internal data monitoring of Shanghai port, the production and operation of Shanghai port terminals have been as usual since February, and there has been no congestion of container ships.”
Shanghai International Port (Group) Co.Ltd(600018) further said that at present, there is absolutely no “congestion comparable to the west American port” in Shanghai port. The number of waiting ships is in single digits and the average number of waiting days is normal.
According to the latest data learned by the reporter, there are 52 suspended ships in Shanghai port, including 43 bulk cargo ships (including 13 domestic trade ships), 9 container ships, including 4 waiting ships. According to the information released by Maersk and other large liner companies in March, due to the alternating impact of the epidemic from the Spring Festival to March, the waiting days of Asian ports are usually 1-2 days, and the average waiting days of Shanghai port are even better than those of representative ports in the north and south.
So why is there such a crowded situation of ships in the screenshot?
The first financial reporter consulted a number of people in the shipping industry. They believe that the Yangtze River estuary is the busiest channel in the world, and it is normal to have many ships, but there are many kinds of ships here, including container ships, bulk carriers and oil tankers, as well as fishing boats, tugs, barges and other small ships (the captain is less than 80 meters).
“The widely circulated map does not distinguish between ships entering and leaving Shanghai port and passing ships from south to north, nor does it distinguish between ships still outside Shanghai at that time and ships that have left here and whose shore based AIS signal has disappeared (AIS refers to the automatic ship identification system). Instead, it is a mixture, and even fishing nets with AIS points may be included.” Wang Hai, editor in chief of the shipping industry network, analyzed to reporters, “in other words, if this picture is true, it is also an instantaneous state of the shore based AIS signal that remains and has disappeared at the time of the screenshot. In addition, the scale of this screenshot is abnormal and appears to be too large, which makes it visually dense.
Another person in the industry took out the picture of ships in the sea area near Shanghai from the marinetraffic website at 7:50 a.m. today (the 3rd). In the picture, red represents oil tankers, green represents cargo ships, orange represents fishing boats, gray is an unrecognized type, dots are waiting at anchor, and arrows are in navigation. When the image scale becomes smaller, it feels like the sea is crowded with ships, and the pictures circulated on the Internet put all kinds of ship types, maybe not even ships, and changed the scale.
Wang Hai further pointed out that according to the public data of vessel data provider vesselsvalue, the number of vessels waiting in line near the Shanghai sea area has increased five times in two and a half weeks recently. However, the number of container ships has not increased significantly, mainly due to the significant increase in the number of dry bulk carriers and oil tankers. The destinations of these two ships are more Zhoushan port in Ningbo, and Shanghai port is still dominated by container ships. At present, the Shanghai port is still operating 24 hours, but the land transportation connecting the wharf freight transportation in the charge of truck drivers is indeed affected by the closure and control in Shanghai and the different epidemic prevention and control policies in the Yangtze River Delta.
Shanghai Port how to alleviate the bottleneck of land transportation under closure
The above-mentioned closure and control refers to that on the 27th, the Shanghai epidemic prevention and control leading group office issued a notice and deployed to carry out a new round of nucleic acid screening in the whole city. The new round of nucleic acid screening was carried out successively in the East, South and west of Huangpu River.
In this regard, Shanghai International Port (Group) Co.Ltd(600018) said that the land transportation logistics of the port has indeed been affected recently, because according to the requirements of epidemic control, the cross provincial transportation of land container trucks needs to provide the negative certificate of the driver’s nucleic acid test result, and the transportation volume is lower than before, which really bothered the customers for a time. To this end, Shanghai International Port (Group) Co.Ltd(600018) actively took measures to solve the problem of drivers’ difficulty on the road, helped truck drivers apply for relevant passes, and took a series of measures to ensure stability and supply and promote smooth connection.
First, empty containers have been pre loaded to the client. After the Spring Festival, Shanghai Port helped shipping companies transport empty containers to inland points to prepare for subsequent production recovery by taking advantage of non peak operation and a large number of empty containers returning.
Second, the ways of entering and carrying boxes are more diversified. During the period of epidemic prevention and control and grid screening, Shanghai Port actively optimized and launched the “container land to water” service, which covers all terminals in Yangshan Area and Shanghai Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone Group Co.Ltd(600648) area of Shanghai port to relevant ports in the Yangtze River and Yangtze River Delta.
Shanghai International Port (Group) Co.Ltd(600018) ‘s Shanghai port and Yangtze River multimodal transport Co. Ltd. officially launched the “public transport precursor” official account, helping to build a more smooth Shanghai port collection and distribution channel. Shanghai port sea rail intermodal transport Co., Ltd. issued an announcement for the first time to provide multi-site docking and daily train service of sea rail intermodal transport at Luchao central station. These measures are effective means of collection and distribution to alleviate the pressure of shortage of road transportation resources caused by the impact of the epidemic.
At present, Shanghai International Port (Group) Co.Ltd(600018) also cooperates with COSCO, Maersk, Dafei, Mediterranean and other liner companies to actively publicize various supplementary collection and distribution methods to customers. The proportion of customers using waterway and railway to enter the container keeps rising, and the amount of customer consultation is also increasing significantly.
The third is to help improve the efficiency of land traffic. In order to meet the new epidemic prevention requirements of container vehicles involved in the inbound transportation of Shanghai port, the port and shipping department of Shanghai International Port (Group) Co.Ltd(600018) has launched the container truck epidemic prevention pass in only 12 hours, integrating electronic bill of lading, application code and 48 hour nucleic acid negative certificate, so that the container transport vehicles of Shanghai port can travel “one yard” smoothly, and the traffic efficiency of the outer ring tunnel has been greatly improved.
“At present, Shanghai Port still maintains normal operation. In addition to being affected by extreme weather, Shanghai Port operates normally, the port implements closed-loop management, and production and operation support personnel are stationed in the port area,” Shanghai International Port (Group) Co.Ltd(600018) said that the reports of individual media exaggerating wharf congestion are groundless and are creating panic.
