Shipping Industry Experts Say Backlog Might Finally Be Letting Up

Maersk CEO Soren Skou told Bloomberg last week that he believes the shipping crisis, wreaking havoc in international trade across the world, may return to normal in the coming months.

In the interview, Skou said that the shipping backlogs will begin to let up in the second half of the year, easing some of the pressure on major ports, like West Coast ports that have seen upwards of 100 ships waiting to access the port.

"We are guiding in an environment where we are coming out of a pandemic, and we don't have much experience with that to be honest," Skou said, according to Fortune. "So we are saying we expect quite a strong first half of 2022, and then we expect what we call a normalization early in the second half."

For the first time in three months, that backup in Southern California is starting to lessen. Hellenic Shipping News reported this week that the number of ships waiting to access the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach decreased to 78, down from the peak of 109 just a month ago.

Officials aren't sure whether it's just the end of the holiday surge or a sign of prolonged shipping decreases. Port of Los Angeles executive director Gene Seroka said, "no one is taking a victory lap" just yet.

And though the number is decreasing, it's still high from a historical perspective. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, ships rarely had to wait for access to the port.

"We do not have much visibility to what will happen when people return to work, when bottlenecks open up and a lot of the capacity tied up today in Los Angeles and Long Beach gets released—how is that going to work out," Skou added. "We'll have to see."

If that is the case, it would alleviate a lot of problems that suppliers are experiencing with sourcing from major manufacturing hubs in Asia like China or Vietnam.

The hope is that this is not just a decrease from the historic highs of the holiday season rush, but a sign of a return to normalcy—or at least something like it. A lot is up to China's lockdown policies.