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International container shipping through the Covid-19 pandemic - Disruptions from a Swedish perspective
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Safety and Transport, Maritime department. Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-8785-7047
University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Safety and Transport, Maritime department.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6029-806X
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2024 (English)Report (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

At the onset of the pandemic in spring 2020, the Swedish shipping sector was first affected by border closures preventing passengers to use RoPax shipping and cruise ferries. There were some blank sailings but in general they kept operating to foster intra-European trade by trucks despite the missing revenues from passengers. Shipping in general was affected by port disrup-tions and complicated crew changes. Eventually, however, it was clear that the most dramatic disruptions on a global scale where experienced in the container segment. General media reported on delayed goods, high freight rates and, however not related to the pandemic, the Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal for a week in March 2021. Currently, there are few reports of supply chains and shipping suffering from disruptions and capacity constraints related to the pandemic. The peak in freight rates was rather replaced by depressed rates and there is a certain risk that some logisticians and supply chain managers regard the pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime event and just want to get back to a previous be-haviour seeing container shipping as a commodity with indefinite capacity at a reasonable price. Nevertheless, the war in Ukraine, the drought in the Panama Canal and the attacks by the Houthi rebels in the Red Sea create other problems for container shipping. Freight rates increase significantly, but from very low levels. The purpose of the report is to describe and analyse how international container shipping was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and other disruptions. The analysis takes a Swedish perspective on disruptions and tries to go beyond the anecdotal reporting and capture what happened and why. Container shipping is put into a context of economy, consumption, world trade, supply chains and logistics. The pandemic and more current events affecting container shipping market are described together with how shipping lines responded. A series of interviews with Swedish actors revealed how they perceived the disruptions and what countermeasures the actors have applied to mitigate the effects, their organisational learning and how they prepare for future disruptions

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2024. , p. 40
Series
Working Paper Series. Logistic and Transport Research Group. No. 2024.1, ISSN 1652-1021
Keywords [en]
Covid-19, pandemic, container shipping, resilience, disruption
National Category
Mechanical Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-72008OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-72008DiVA, id: diva2:1839579
Note

This work was funded by the Swedish Transport Administration through the project The role of liner shipping for robust supply chains (Linjesjöfartens roll för robusta försörjnings-kedjor) and Lighthouse through the pre-study projects Shipping post-covid (Sjöfarten post-corona) and Regionalised supply chains and the effects on shipping (Regionaliserade försörjning-skedjor och påverkan på sjöfarten). In addition, University of Gothenburg and Chalmers have funded parts of the work through the joint Strategic Research Area Transport.

Available from: 2024-02-21 Created: 2024-02-21 Last updated: 2024-07-28Bibliographically approved

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Altuntas Vural, CerenRogerson, SaraSvanberg, Martin

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CiteExportLink to record
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