Accounting for 17% of China’s container traffic and 27% of China’s exports in 2021, it has been the world’s busiest port for the past 10 years. Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Shanghai, China’s most populous city, is restricted due to the surge in infections caused by the Omicron variant. A scenario that has forced municipalities to intensify measures against SARS-CoV-2.
Despite the sanitation measures put in place to avoid further contagion and reduce the impact of the wave on the city, the decision to confine Shanghai has produced a recovery effect on the city’s economic activity, marked in part by limited port activity in the last few weeks. There is a traffic jam both when ships arrive and when they depart. Hundreds of ships are waiting to be loaded and unloaded in the Chinese city.
Accounting for 17% of China’s container traffic and 27% of China’s exports in 2021, it has been the world’s busiest port for the past 10 years.
The consequence of this traffic jam is, according to many experts Maritime traffic, which will lead to a slowdown in imports, a risk to the supply chain in the rest of the world and, above all, negative economic consequences for companies that export and import their products from Shanghai. In statements to ‘NIUS’, the President of the FTEIA Commission explained the factors causing these traffic jams.
“This concerns an issue that has not been resolved and has been dragging on since 2020, such as maritime traffic congestion, shortage of containers, a weakened supply chain,” he told the aforementioned media outlet. In this way, a situation similar to that seen months ago with the semiconductor crisis last October due to the shortage of this product on a global scale is being generated.
According to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC for its English acronym), Shanghai exported products worth more than 200,000 million euros in 2020 and imported 323,000 million euros in the same year. In terms of exports, the top-selling products were automatic data processing machines, mobile phones, electronic circuits, automobiles, cranes and textile materials.
In the import chapter, passenger cars and other commodities such as iron ore, copper and aluminum stand out. Some objects, along with others from other categories, may not reach their respective destinations on time due to bottlenecks that may occur due to city port congestion.
(With information from ace and BBC)