News / European port congestion easing – for now

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Port congestion across North Europe’s key hubs appears to be abating – although the relief may be short-lived.

Lasse Daene, senior manager of ocean freight at Flexport, said in today’s freight market update: “The long-lasting containers are now slowly moving out, and we are not seeing the massive delays anymore. 

“We have been speaking about this for roughly two and a half months. It started in Rotterdam and then spread over the other ports; we have seen a couple of weeks where we had seen seven days [delay],” he explained. 

“At the moment, we are seeing something between one day, ten hours to two days for the maximum times at ports. This is a sign that we are going away from the major delays… it’s slowly going down.” 

Rolf Habben Jensen, CEO of Hapag-Lloyd, told The Loadstar on the side lines of Transport Logistic in Munich that port congestion in Europe “is a worry”. 

“If we look at the overall network, then Northern Europe is probably one of the real hotspots. UK was an issue, but I think we’re getting it under control. Rotterdam is difficult. Some terminals are good, others not so good, and Bremerhaven is also tight,” he said.  

Mr Habben Jensen estimated most of those problems would be “behind us” in four to six weeks. 

However, Flexport warned that port congestion in North European threatened to erupt again next month. He said: “There are a couple of things to take into consideration.

“In Hamburg, there’s work on the railway at the beginning of July. We will have the Hamburg terminals disconnected from rail in Germany over an entire weekend. That will cause some impact, because every container has to be taken out by truck instead, and there are only a certain number of truck slots,” he explained.

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam there has been an indefinite strike at APM Terminals Maasvlakte II facility since 4 June, he added.

These factors will likely result in “spot congestion”, rather than create blockages en masse across Europe, according to Mr Daene. 

“Really nudge your freight forwarder to be proactive on those topics,” he urged. 

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