He is also threatening to apply tariffs on EU imports, focusing on the motor industry. Mind you, in May he thought that negotiations with China were going well. Perhaps the pressures from Congress needed diversionary tactics. But bully tactics in the international marketplace rarely work.<\/p>\n
Just as we thought that the maritime industry was beginning to see some daylight for its systemic capacity surplus which has pushed freight rates to ridiculously low levels, any hope of reaching some sort of equilibrium seems to be heading for the rocks.<\/p>\n
Maritime transportation is theoretically structured to meet derived demand in order to support global trade. GDP per capita remains the primary driver of this demand but with pressures such as those above exerted on the consumption element it is hard to see how 2019 can turn out to be a good year. Reduction in demand caused by higher costs due to trade wars can only go in one direction, downward.<\/p>\n
The continuing imbalance between supply (shipping capacity) and demand has been only partially addressed by the formation of super alliances using increased slow steaming and missed voyages tactics to stem capacity. Not helped by a relatively strong orderbook, the industry will surely face another poor financial year.<\/p>\n
The ports will continue to see increased pressures from the shipping lines as they try to keep costs down. For example, in North Europe the announcement by COSCO that they were shifting services to Zeebrugge to their own terminal will increase price competition in that region. However, the capacity of Zeebrugge is limited which will limit the number of services that can be shifted. Further north, JadeWeserPort appears to be making significant inroads into the Baltic transhipment market which will further hit the Rotterdam-Hamburg range of ports.<\/p>\n
The excess of port capacity in Asia and Europe will surely take its toll on profitability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
COMMENT: US President Donald Trump announced, in a tweet, that he would raise the 10% tariff on $200bn of Chinese imported goods to 25% and that an additional $325bn of imports would soon be hit with a 25% tariff as well. That about covers all imports from China, writes Ben Hackett.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":649,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-economist"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":650,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648\/revisions\/650"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}