Miller Magazine Issue: 143 November 2021

81 INTERVIEW MILLER / november 2021 Do you think the worldwide shipping contai- ner shortage will continue next year? The flip side of the boom in the home and de- sign industry over the past year and a half is the global shipping crisis. Demand has never been higher, and wait times never longer. There was a preliminary hope that the rollout of vaccines would help ease the logistical nightmare as consumers began spending less on goods and more on servi- ces and experiences and ports and manufacturers started to return to pre-pandemic staffing levels. But the tangled web that was woven last year is not coming undone so easily. Experts are now sa- ying that it will be at least the first quarter of 2022 before shipping leads time will stabilize. Eventually, the shipping industry thinks the con- tainer shortage will sort itself out. “It is expected that the situation will improve, bottlenecks are expected to be relieved, buying patterns likely to normalize, as well as additional vessels and con- tainers entering the market in 2021, means that the current vessel and container shortage is tem- porary in nature,” Lars Mikael Jensen, an execu- tive at the freight titan Maersk. How long that will take is anyone’s guess. Sondey, the Triton CEO ( World’s Largest Container Leasing Company) predicted on the April earnings call that the shor- tage will drag into 2022: “I haven’t seen any of our customers express confidence that they can, within this current strong period, "unbottleneck" their operations. But any prediction for how the shortage will end needs to be taken with a grain of salt, according to Shih, the Harvard professor. He points to recent unexpected events that have exacerbated trade headaches, like the Suez Canal blockage or the coronavirus outbreak that forced China to close its massive Yantian Port. This stuff keeps happening because there is not enough slack in the global supply chain, and the shortage will get better next year if more stuff doesn’t happen—but that hasn’t been a good assumption lately.