SIMIC

The cost of shipping goods from Asia to Northern Europe had even increased by 570 per cent, but rates still remained slightly lower in absolute terms than for the Asia to California routes, said the report.

The delays are much longer than those at the beginning of the Covid scare in the spring of 2020, when transit time briefly spiked at 56 days, said the report.

According to freight booking platform Freightos, containership pileups at ports on both ends of the journey are significantly increasing the transit time and are adding to the global container shortage that has seen shipping boxes pile up in the US and Europe as the stream of wares coming out of Asia intensified again in 2021.

The more permanent reopening that the US has been experiencing at this point in the Covid crisis has led to many retailers frantically restocking, with the upcoming holiday season already in mind.

Power shortages, recent holidays taking place in China and finally Typhoon Kompasu pummeling the Southern Chinese coast have also slowed the flow.

In October, Freightos said that shipping containers from Asia to the US west coast was now 330 per cent more expensive than it had been a year earlier, said Statista.