WASHINGTON: The bankruptcy of global ocean carrier Hanjin Shipping Co. battered U.S. West Coast seaports in September. For weeks after the South Korean operator filed for bankruptcy protection, its fleet of dozens of vessels—about 3.2% of global container capacity—sat idle in international waters with billions of dollars in cargo trapped on board. The disruption came as retailers were stocking their shelves for the busy holiday season, a time that usually results in among the strongest months at U.S. ports.
Instead, import volumes sank at the ports of Long Beach and Oakland last month. Long Beach, the nation’s second-largest port by container volume, reported a 15% drop in imports compared with September 2015. That made it the weakest September for imports since 2012. In the month, dockworkers imported 282,945 20-foot equivalent units, or TEUs, a standard measure for container cargo.
Long Beach port officials said Hanjin’s containers accounted for 12.3% of the port’s total container volume. In Oakland, the 10th-largest U.S. port and a major hub for Asian cargo, imports were down 4.2% year-over-year. The Bay Area port handled 70,307 loaded import TEUs in September, down from 73,420 last September and 72,271 in September 2014.
Analysts estimated that overall U.S. monthly imports would fall from August to September. But they expected that last month’s performance would still be a slight improvement from a year ago. Panjiva Inc., which tracks customs data, found that while the overall number of import shipments to the U.S. fell 11.2% from August to September of this year, the monthly figure was a 1.3% improvement over September of last year, despite the Hanjin bankruptcy. In terms of exports, Oakland continued to recover, with 76,356 TEUs for the month. That is an improvement of 10% over September 2015, but still off from 2013 and 2014 September exports. Exports out of Long Beach declined, falling 4.2% from the year-earlier period to 120,383 TEUs.
As Hanjin’s bankruptcy proceedings have moved forward in South Korea and New Jersey courts over the past several weeks, Hanjin’s ships have been cleared, one by one, to berth and unload cargo at various ports around the world. But delays and confusion are mounting. Thousands of Hanjin containers—unloaded from ships and emptied of their imported goods—clutter warehouse yards and parking lots, many of them attached to trailers that port truckers need to move other companies’ goods on and off the docks.
This week, Hanjin started accepting empty container drop-offs at port terminals in Long Beach and Seattle, relieving some of those issues. Marine-traffic control in Southern California said Wednesday that the ocean vessel Hanjin Seattle was expected to arrive early next week in Long Beach to discharge more containers. For now, the Seattle is the last Hanjin ship slated for arrival at the Port of Long Beach, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California.
