SIMIC

OCEAN shipments from Asia to the US declined sharply late last year as inflation sapped spending by American families on furniture and toys, reports Tokyo's Nikkei Asia.
Containerships brought 1.31 million TEU from Asia to the US in December, down 23 per cent from a year earlier, reports Miami's logistics researcher Descartes Datamyne. This marked the third straight month that the figure fell by about 20 per cent.
Asia-to-US freight dipped on the year in August for the first time in more than two years, and the decline has accelerated since. For all of 2022, container volume slid four per cent to 19.64 million TEU, the first annual decline in three years.
Inflation has eroded consumer purchasing power, softening demand for household goods and slowing ocean shipping, said an official at a containership company, echoing the sentiment among peers.
Furniture shipments started plummeting in the summer and logged a 28 per cent drop on the year in December. Despite the holiday shopping season, toys tumbled about 50 per cent for each of the last three months of 2022, with the quarterly total even falling below the 2019 level.
As a shortage of dockers caused logjams of ships through the first half of 2022, retailers rushed to bulk up inventories to keep plenty of products on hand. Such efforts subsided after supply chains showed signs of repair later in the year.
Freight from China, a big exporter of consumer goods, fell about 30 per cent on the year in each month from October to December, driving down the total. Demand for Chinese-made goods before the Lunar New Year holiday was weaker than usual as well.