“So, retailers are building safety stock. “Holidays kind of have a ‘hard deadline’ in the sense that a holiday gift delivered late simply will not do,” he said. Yet if ever in the year retailers want to minimize disruption, this is it, said Aleksandar Tomic, associate dean for strategy, innovation and technology at Boston College. “With the more complex toys and electronics, we may have shortages,” he said. Among foreign-made goods, the most likely shortages are in goods that depend on silicon chips. This holiday’s shortages are least likely in products made in the United States, said Osadchiy. That scarcity has meant shutdowns in auto assembly plants, including the massive Kia plant in West Point. The past few months, the highest-profile shortage has been in production of vehicles, which cannot get enough of the silicon chips used in the on-board computers. What if retailers buy the wrong goods? What if each of their efforts adds up to too much buying? That could mean dropping prices, layoffs and more disruption in the supply chain. The rush to stock up has its own danger, Osadchiy said. “Right now, it’s not predictable at all.” “We used to have an efficient system where everything on the supply chain was synchronized,” said Nikolay Osadchiy, an associate professor who teaches supply chain management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. One of the casualties is “just in time” inventories - the pre-pandemic practice in which businesses kept little stock on hand to keep costs down and were able to quickly replenish that stock as needed. But those efforts are complicated since the world’s supply chain is still struggling to rebalance itself after repeated disruptions more than 18 months into a pandemic. With the overall economy growing, incomes up for most people, and discretionary travel still subpar, there is a lot of money for holiday buying, economists say.ĭespite a still-uncontrolled coronavirus, many retailers are betting on a robust holiday season - and that means trying to stock up in advance. “The backlogs and delays in ports are very worrisome,” said Pinar Keskinocak, a professor in Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. When ships and trucks and people have to wait, the whole system becomes less efficient and more costly. At the giant West Coast ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, more than 60 ships have been lined up at times this month, part of an unprecedented global bottleneck in moving goods. Much of the demand now is pegged to the approaching holidays.īut moving all of that cargo isn’t easy. It transmits, among other things, call sign, vessel type, GPS position, dimensions and similar data.About 65% of containers passing the port are imports bound for American companies and consumers. Every ship over 20m has to transmit an AIS signal. These are used in shipping to exchange navigational data via radio. Following the relaxation of these measures, things are now looking up again with exports increasing significantly in May.įleetmon uses Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) signals from ships to display traffic volumes. This also affected port employees, which is the reason why the world’s largest port currently has to make do with significantly fewer staff. The reason for the traffic jam was the stringent lockdown imposed on the city by the Chinese government. The situation is even more dramatic off the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp,” the IfW reported.įreight and container ships have also been jammed for weeks off the port of Shanghai and the neighboring province of Zheijang, as this Statista infographic shows. “In the German Bight, about a dozen large container ships with a total capacity of about 150,000 standard containers are waiting to dock in Hamburg or Bremerhaven. According to the IfW, the affected ships can neither be loaded nor unloaded. The Ship JamĪccording to the “Kiel Trade Indicator” compiled by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), almost two percent of global cargo capacity is currently stuck in the North Sea off the ports of Germany, Holland and Belgium. This map illustrates how the global economy is once again suffering from delays in container shipping, reports Satatista. Further north off the mouth of the Elbe, a number of cargo ships are also moored and waiting to be allowed to enter the port. Tankers and cargo ships are currently jammed in front of the European ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp, as shown in this infographic based on a snapshot from FleetMon, an online tracking portal for ships.
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