Supply Chain News: L.A./Long Beach Backlog Clears

Courtesy of Michael Best Strategies -
Some really good news you may have missed during the upheaval over the potential rail strike. On November 23, the account that tracks the number of ships in and around the Ports of LA and Long Beach declared the backlog over. The pending queue at the two ports hit zero for the first time since October 2020, although there was a queue of 59 ships across other ports on the East and Gulf coasts. But that's nothing compared to what we saw last year. But it's possible that chaos created a shift. The Port of New York and New Jersey, for instance, which benefitted from the West Coast port chaos, is fighting to keep those customers heading east.

The time it takes for a container to cross the Pacific remained flat at 75 days, which is still above slightly above pre-pandemic levels. The price to ship a container from Shanghai to LA is all the way down to $2,069, nearly back to the pre-pandemic level (it was $5,562 on September 1).