Prices for space on ships across the Pacific into the US also rose, with spot rates from Shanghai to Los Angeles jumping about 16% — the biggest increase for the route this year — to US$3,136 per forty-foot equivalent unit for the week ending May 15, according to the Drewry World Container Index. The global composite index also rose the most this year.
A temporary trade truce between the world’s two largest economies has sparked a knee-jerk bounce across China’s ports and factory floors.
In the week beginning May 12, when the US and China agreed to sharply reduce tariffs for 90 days, bookings on freighters headed from China to US shores more than doubled from the prior week to about 228,000 TEUs, or twenty-foot equivalent units, data from container-tracking platform Vizion and data provider Dun & Bradstreet shows.
