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With the explosion of e-commerce, the prosperity of the shipping industry may continue until 2022. David Jordan, Asia Regional Director of Maritime Strategies International (MSI), a shipping consulting agency, said that from the demand side, the surge in freight demand will continue until the second quarter of this year, and the current freight volume is still at a historical high.

MSI predicts that container shipping volume will increase by about 7% in 2021, and the growth may continue until 2022. At the same time, with the increase in container availability and the gradual elimination of logistics bottlenecks, spot shipping prices will decline in the next few quarters.

Sea-Intelligence CEO Alan Murphy said that the volume loss of the container shipping in the first half of 2020 is evenly distributed across all markets, but the volume growth since August 2020 is mainly reflected in the North American market.

Murphy believes that it is American consumers that are really driving the recovery. Although since the third quarter of 2020, the volume of export boxes in the United States has continued to grow, future demand growth will depend on the level of retail inventory.

Murphy said that although overall consumer spending in the United States is lower than before COVID-19, spending on goods exceeds spending on services, and container shipping has benefited as a result. With the abolition of anti-epidemic restrictions, a large part of these expenditures will return to the service sector.

It should be pointed out that although the restart of service spending may lead to a contraction of consumer spending on goods, e-commerce will continue to be hot for a period of time because inventory replenishment has not yet been completed.