After the record-breaking falls of January, global long-term ocean freight rates held up surprisingly well in February, boosted by “a special month” for US exports. According to the latest data from the Xeneta Shipping Index (XSI), average long-term contracted rates dropped by just 1% across the month, following on from a 13.3% month-on-month collapse in January. Despite the relatively strong performance, seen against a backdrop of weak fundamentals, Xeneta notes that this is the now the sixth consecutive month of falls, with the index losing 22% of its value since August 2022.
Aside from the US export rates growth, the majority of arrows point resolutely downwards. The US import sub-index fell by 3.9%, but is still 79.86% up against this time last year. Two of the routes that make up this XSI defied the overall trend, with the South American East Coast - US East Coast and the Southern part of Africa - US East Coast showing their first growth since November 2022 (by 13% and 8% respectively).
The Far East saw both benchmarks drop, with import rates declining 4.4% (up 13% year-on-year) and the all-important export XSI dropping by 4.6%. Although this latter figure has fallen consistently over recent months it remains a “mighty” 244.5% up compared to the per-pandemic days of January 2020.
In Europe there was a break in the economic clouds for the import XSI, which moved up 3.5% on the back of strong import rates in to the Mediterranean Sea from the US East and West Coasts (with the average of all valid long term rates rising by 86% and 49% respectively). The benchmark is now 31.6% up year-on-year. Exports moved in the opposite direction, with this XSI dropping by 2.6% (up 65.3% from February 2022). Xeneta’s data showed steady declines across the board, with exports out of the Mediterranean Sea to Korea and Japan falling the most.
The global XSI remains 43.0% up year-on-year. Rates have climbed by 207.7% from the January 2020.
Xeneta is the leading ocean and air freight rate benchmarking and market intelligence platform transforming the shipping and logistics industry. Xeneta’s powerful reporting and analytics platform provides liner-shipping stakeholders the data they need to understand current and historical market behavior – reporting live on market average and low/high movements for both short and long-term contracts. Xeneta’s data is comprised of over 300 million contracted container and air freight rates and covers over 160,000 global ocean trade routes and over 40,000 airport-airport connections. Xeneta is a privately held company with headquarters in Oslo, Norway and regional offices in New York and Hamburg.