The $10 billion container shipping industry, the one that moves boxes full of everything and anything around global seas, has this phenomenon called \u201cblank sailings.\u201d<\/p>\n
To understand the term of art, think of the world-spanning ocean-bound trade economy like a bus system, where several buses\u2014or ships\u2014are making stops along a set route. If the people running the bus system\u2014or the shipping company\u2014realize there\u2019s not enough passenger demand for their bus to run the route in the middle of the day, they\u2019ll cancel one of those circuits. Same with shipping companies: If they realize there aren\u2019t enough bookings to justify a container ship running its standard route, the company will \u201cblank\u201d the sailing, combining the goods that were supposed to be on that ship with those traveling later in the week.<\/p>\n
This is normal shipping stuff. But not this month. As the effects of President Donald Trump\u2019s new tariffs on foreign goods<\/a>\u2014and the trade war they\u2019ve ignited<\/a>\u2014set in, many shippers who usually send goods across the Pacific Ocean have paused or canceled their shipments. Data from the supply-chain research firm Sea-Intelligence shows that blank sailings<\/a> to the US\u2019s West Coast spiked 13 percent this week, and is due to jump to 28 percent the week after. The Port of Los Angeles, the nation\u2019s largest, expects 17 total blank sailings in May<\/a>, which means the port will lose 224,000 \u201ctwenty-foot equivalent units of capacity,\u201d the standard metric used to measure the contents in one container. In total, the port\u2019s data shows<\/a>, import volumes will be down 31 percent next week compared to the same week last year.<\/p>\n That means a lot of stuff once bound for the US is no longer coming\u2014and an especially lot of that stuff is from China<\/a>. This is the unusual part. \u201cThis is very extreme,\u201d says Simon Heaney, the senior manager of container research at Drewry, a maritime research and advisory firm. \u201cIt\u2019s unprecedented in the history of containerization.\u201d The blank sailings, he says, are \u201can early canary in the coal mine. When you see carriers suspending services, it tells you there isn\u2019t enough demand [for goods], or that freight rates are falling very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n