High shipping rates due to demand/supply disruption in container business: Gujarat Pipavav Port

PIPAVAV : Gujarat Pipavav reported its earnings for the June-ended quarter. Jakob Friis Sorensen, MD, Gujarat Pipavav Port discussed the earnings fineprint and outlook.

The container business is looking good but he believes there are many unpredictabilities.“Supply and demand are disrupted because shipping lines are not able to find the ships or capacity to redeploy. There is congestion in the ports, cargos being held up, empty containers are not available because full containers are standing all over the place and ships are delayed, which is giving a knock-on effect,” he said.“That has resulted in very high shipping rates. I don’t think that it is sustainable in the long run but unfortunately now the latest flip is that the port in Ningbo-Zhoushan has been shut down due to COVID-19. So, there is just one disruption globally after the other which also impacts India. To some degree, we are cushioned from that in Pipavav but it does affect us,” he mentioned.”It could take the rest of the year to end, maybe into 2022 before we see some relief,” he said.Cyclone Tauktae – in May 2021- also affected the operations of the company.”We had made sure that all our equipment, our big cranes were fastened correctly and we had no severe injuries to our people. It took us around two weeks to recover from the power outage. I am happy to say that we were down only for two weeks,” he said.

Source : CNBC TV 18