Those who are still waiting for the smartphone they ordered before Christmas will at least be given a reason: Containers are in short supply. Meanwhile, the crisis in world trade is coming to a head dramatically.

The "Financial Times" reports that freight rates on the most important shipping route between China and Northern Europe have tripled in the past eight weeks. Booking a 40-foot container on this route now costs more than 9,000 dollars, up from 2,000 dollars in November. This figure is roughly in line with the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index, which shows a price of 4413 dollars for 20-foot standard containers half as long as this as of 15 January.

Lars Jensen of the consultancy Seaintelligence spoke of a "bottleneck problem". "Prices are driven by customers fighting for a scarce resource: containers." In the second half of 2020, trade in goods between Europe and Asia really boomed. At the same time, many empty containers were still stranded in ports as a result of the trade collapse at the beginning of the Corona crisis, where they are now not needed.

Moreover, ports could not handle as many goods as demanded, explained John Butler, president of the shipping association World Shipping Council: "Coming off a huge crash, we were whipped by historically high volumes of goods, and now there is more than the terminals can effectively handle."

In addition, capacity is being diverted from the China-Europe route in favour of trade across the Pacific, writes the Financial Times - even though there are no shortage premiums to be earned there. Freight rates between China and the USA have stabilised since October after the Chinese government intervened with the shipping companies.

For European importers, the question now is whether they can accept longer waiting times or pass on the high transport prices to their customers. In recent purchasing manager panels, a large number of companies have already reported disruptions in delivery traffic. Many companies are opting to first exhaust their stocks as much as possible. But some stocks are already empty, as in the case of microchips, whose shortage is already paralysing car production in some places.

The Chinese New Year, which falls on 12 February this year, could provide hope for relief: around the holidays, industrial production in Asia traditionally slows down noticeably. This could give logistics companies time to work through the delivery backlog.

Most economists, however, expect the imbalance between supply and demand in maritime transport to increase. John Butler expects pressure to ease only "when people have more opportunity to spend money on services" that are now off-limits in the lockdown - physical consumer goods as a substitute satisfaction would then be less in demand. "But when that will happen is anyone's guess".