Easing Of Vessel Congestion At LA Ports Reverses As More Ships Join Queue

Last week’s good news of easing vessel congestion earlier this month outside the busiest U.S. gateway for trade with Asia showed a glimmer of hope that supply chain disruptions could subside had flipped last week as more containerships join the queue.  

Bloomberg data shows the number of containerships queuing off the coast of Los Angeles reached the highest in two weeks.

As of Sunday, 21 containerships were anchored waiting for entry into L.A.-Long Beach, compared with 19 a week earlier. The bottleneck peaked at around 40 vessels in the queue in early February and has steadily declined ever since, but the latest data shows progress could be reversing. 

Shipping data shows another 16 vessels are expected to arrive at L.A.-Long Beach over the next few days, with ten of those scheduled to be moored offshore and join the queue. 

On Friday, the average waits for berth space, a designated location in a port used for mooring vessels when they are not at sea, was 5.9 days, compared with 6.1 a week earlier. That number peaked in April around eight days.

Readers may recall the collapse of the trans-pacific supply chains has been among the main reasons for soaring prices. It’s also hardly a secret that the most vulnerable section of supply chains are West Coast ports where congestion remains off the charts (as recently discussed in “It’s About To Get Much Worse”: Supply Chains Implode As “Price Doesn’t Even Matter Anymore” and “Port Of LA Volumes Are “Off The Charts.””) Which is why the first, and most critical step to restoring normalcy in both supply chains – and prices – will come from stabilizing and normalizing shipping congestion and backlog… at some point.

But as new data suggest, shipping congestion and backlogs are reversing and could result in even higher prices for any product that has to cross the Pacific before ending up in an Amazon warehouse or Walmart store shelf.