Typhoon Champi is threatening the port recovery that eastern China had only just started to record, with ferry suspensions and maritime emergency responses already in force across Shanghai and the Fujian and Zhejiang provinces Friday.
No container terminal closures have been reported at major ports including Shanghai and Ningbo-Zhoushan.
Maersk told customers on Tuesday that conditions at Chinese ports had improved and vessel waiting times had continued to decline from the disruption left by earlier typhoons, which at one point had been responsible for more than 4 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) waiting to berth at container ports globally through early September, according to data from Linerlytica.
That congestion-driving figure has since dropped to 3.36 million TEUs, or 9.7 percent of the global fleet. But Maersk warned that strong export demand was still pressuring congested ports and that intermittent delays would continue on certain trade lanes as conditions normalized.
Figures released by Drewry Thursday showed the recovery taking hold before the storm arrived, with average waiting times falling from 58 hours to 38 hours at Shanghai from the week prior, while those at Ningbo had decreased from 40 hours to 34 hours.
“Golden Week provided an opportunity for ports to clear backlogs and improve schedule reliability, supported by reduced cargo volumes and blank sailings,” said Drewry in the update.
Terminal-level data from Seko Logistics showed a more uneven picture underneath those averages on Friday, with Shanghai’s Waigaoqiao terminal experiencing waits at one to two-and-a-half days and idling times at Yangshan varying at around four days at one terminal grouping and six to seven days at the others.
Ningbo-Zhoushan yard density had returned to normal after Golden Week, the same Seko update said, although waits still ran one-and-a-half to three days across its terminals.
The operational risk from Champi runs through vessel movement and pilotage rather than through a confirmed shutdown of container handling. Kuehne+Nagel reported on Thursday citing Lloyd’s List Intelligence, that terminals at Ningbo, Yangshan and Waigaoqiao were fully operational as of 11 a.m. that day, with yards, warehouses and trucking also operating normally.
Seko nonetheless expects temporary gate suspensions and pilotage halts for Ningbo, Shanghai, Xiamen and Fuzhou from Friday night through Monday, with intermittent pilotage suspensions at Yangshan across the same window.
Sea-Intelligence set out the damage the earlier storms had already done to reliability before Champi formed in a Sept. 30 press release on its August data, with China posting the region’s worst schedule reliability at 23.9 percent, Shanghai at 12.2 percent and Ningbo at 16.9 percent. The maritime research firm calculated the average delay for late vessels across Asia at 7.28 days.
The company had separately projected earlier last month that the accumulated congestion could take seven to 10 months to ease back to the relatively calm conditions of mid-2025, a timeline that would run through next summer. A return to end-of-2025 conditions could take six to eight months.
Earlier this month, Dimerco’s October Asia Pacific Freight Report warned that the Port of Shanghai was expected to remain heavily congested into mid-to-late October, with berthing waits above five days. The freight forwarder measured on-time performance at Shanghai at 21 percent.
Drewry port consultants have set out why a short interruption can outlast the storm itself in the firm’s Ports and Terminals Insight, estimating that a terminal running at 90 percent berth utilization takes roughly one week to recover from a one-day disruption, against two days at 75 percent.
“The difference between those two operating points, in normal years, could be the difference between a competitive and an uncompetitive return on capital,” said Drewry. “In a shock year, it is the difference between a manageable event and one that puts cargo on the water for an extra fortnight or more.”
Taiwan compounds the regional picture because the storm closed work and customs throughout the country on Friday. Seko warned shippers through Taiwan, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, Shanghai and southwestern Japan to anticipate air cargo rollovers, berthing delays and customs and trucking backlogs early in the coming week.
Whether Champi reverses the October recovery will turn on how much of the forecast suspension window materializes at the container terminals over the weekend, with the next weekly waiting time readings set to show whether the pre-storm averages survived it.