As the world’s largest transshipment hub, shipping agents in Singapore found themselves in daily battles to get their cargo onboard, dealing with various issues from overbooked vessels to having their load bumped off by higher-paying companies. During the pandemic, a shipment of frozen lobsters from Boston to Singapore took over two months instead of 35 days, and shipping costs from the US and Perth to Singapore increased three and six times, respectively.
Over the decades, we have seen isolated incidents that have caused minimal and temporary supply chain issues, but then came 2020 on the heels of the Covid-19 pandemic and the global supply chain network as we knew it was forever changed. Two years on, alongside ongoing US-China trade tensions, rising nationalism, and now the Ukraine-Russia war, global supply chain woes continue.
According to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), being an upstream manufacturer with geographically diversified imports, Singapore’s trade was not materially affected by pandemic-related disruptions during its peak in 2021 compared to other Asian markets. Despite this, Singaporean businesses were not exempt from delays in shipments of raw material supplies and higher freight costs stemming from worldwide shortages in containers and vessels and unprecedented levels of port congestion.
