Those most exposed to delays right now are manufacturers with low inventory levels and operating on tight schedules, Bowie said.
Automakers Tesla and Volvo have already been forced to halt production at some plants in Europe due to delivery delays.
Changing a ship’s route requires it to remain at sea longer, reducing its overall carrying capacity. Hapag-Lloyd has been chartering vessels outside its own fleet to fill the gap.
The shipping delays have also disrupted the shipping container supply chain, Bowie said. “Ships are sailing a little bit behind. What we’re seeing is that the lag is also creating challenges for containers. Containers are in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Hapag-Lloyd is buying and hiring more containers to alleviate the shortage, but the overall market is short, Bowie said. Port delays are causing problems across the industry.
“Everything we do is very tied to individual ports, which have individual calving slots on certain days and at certain times,” he added. “If it falls outside the birthing frame, it becomes very difficult to insert a blood vessel.”
Even if the ship is there, the containers needed to navigate may not be present.
“There are other cases where shipping companies have containers in port, but the ship is not in port,” Bowie said.
However, the situation is far from the disruption seen during the pandemic supply chain crisis. Fares are still only a fraction of what they were at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Bowie said the coronavirus was a more extreme scenario because supply chain disruptions occurred at the same time as demand for furniture and other goods skyrocketed.
This time around, Western consumers are still reeling from the cost of living crisis and are cutting back on spending on consumer goods.
“I’d like to think there’s very little impact on the actual retailer or the end consumer,” Bowie said. “But a lot depends on how long this lasts.”
At the same time, the shipping industry is grappling with other issues.
Panama’s water shortage has cut traffic through the Panama Canal, another shipping choke point that carries about 5% of the world’s shipping trade, by more than half.
Trade on rivers such as the Amazon, Rhine, and Mississippi has also been severely hampered by low water levels.
“People think products will magically appear on the shelf,” Bowie says. “Well, not really. It involves a huge investment and it involves many different aspects of the supply chain, of which we are just one part.”