August 8, 2023 — U.S. ports are predicted to see their highest cargo volumes since 2022 this August, in advance of the holiday season.
In its monthly shipping update, the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates found the logistics environment in the second half of 2023 is normalizing.
October 18, 2022 — The good news is that there were fewer than 100 container ships stuck waiting off North American ports on Friday. The bad news is that there were still 99 container ships offshore and the pre-COVID norm was in the single digits.
There’s still a long way to go to clear the backlog. But the current tally is now back to June levels and 35% off recent highs.
The number of ships waiting off North American ports peaked at around 150 in January, with waiting vessels almost entirely off the West Coast. The queue fell through the spring as Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, improved their cargo flows. It rebounded back to over 150 in late July, propelled by traffic jams off East and Gulf Coast ports. It has gradually declined since then.
According to an American Shipper survey of MarineTraffic ship-position data, together with the latest queue lists from California ports, there were 27 container vessels off the West Coast and 72 off the East and Gulf coasts as of mid-day Friday.
August 30, 2022 — More than 130 vessels are waiting to unload at North American ports, an ongoing symptom of supply-chain bottlenecks that have stymied the global economy.
U.S. imports totaled 2.53 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEU) in July, up 3 percent year-over-year and up 15 percent from July 2019, according to new data from Descartes, per FreightWaves. It was the country’s busiest-ever July for imports, and the fifth-highest monthly volume ever recorded by Descartes.