The Manzanillo terminal is operating without sufficient staff and handling greater demand than expected, says Fernando Ruiz.

Congestion at the country’s maritime terminals for unloading goods could cause delays in the arrival of products for El Buen Fin, Mexico’s nationwide shopping weekend to be held November 10-16 this year, warned Fernando Ruiz Huarte, director general of the Mexican Business Council for Foreign Trade, Investment and Technology (Comce).

In an interview with El Sol de México, the business leader noted that the congestion is concentrated at the port of Manzanillo, which receives 47 percent of the cargo arriving in the country, where unloading vessels has gone from eight to as many as 20 days.

“The (Covid) issue is starting to get resolved and there is a rebound; more containers are arriving than expected and this creates that problem at the ports, basically those on the Pacific, where cargo from all the Asian countries comes in,” he said.

In addition, Ruiz Huarte commented that the shipping lines arriving at Mexico’s Pacific ports generally call at both ports on that coast, that is, Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas, in Michoacán, a port that could relieve the saturation at the port in Colima.

“Lázaro Cárdenas is not congested; the problem Lázaro Cárdenas has is the railroad — the line is blocked and for that reason it is not a solution at this time. That contributed to the congestion at Manzanillo, because a lot of cargo moved from Lázaro to Manzanillo because the train is at a standstill,” he said.

“So these effects could indeed mean that some products are not on the shelf for El Buen Fin,” he asserted.

The business leader added that another factor working against companies ahead of “the cheapest weekend of the year” is the rising cost of freight.

According to Comce data, the cost of transporting goods quadrupled in value, going from 4,000 dollars to as much as 16,000 dollars for each container leaving China for the American continent.

“And there is no sign they will come down in the short term, among other reasons because the pandemic created a shortage of containers,” he added.

FOREIGN TRADE WILL REBOUND THIS YEAR

The director of Comce stated at a press conference that by the end of 2021, Mexican exports will surpass pre-pandemic 2019 levels, driven mainly by the manufacturing sector.

By the close of this year, the executive projected that the country’s exports will reach 465 billion dollars, an increase of 5 billion compared with the close of two years ago.

In August, he recalled, shipments of goods abroad reached 40.313 billion dollars, a drop of two percent from the previous month.

However, in the first eight months of the year, exports totaled 317.3 billion dollars, an annual increase of 24.3 percent.

He added that manufacturing sales lead exports with 88 percent of the volume.

The sector’s growth comes even though the automotive industry dipped slightly due to the chip shortage, “which did not arrive on time and forced the (assembly) plants to implement technical stoppages, and this is what caused the reduction in our country’s total exports.”

In the meeting with the media, Ruiz Huarte elaborated that if chip demand does not recover or adequate mechanisms are not found to supply domestic demand, it could indeed put the year-end targets at risk, as could a resurgence of the Covid pandemic worldwide.

The director of Comce stated that another strategic export sector is the agri-food industry, although it accounts for only 4.1 percent of total shipments abroad. With reporting by Jacob Sánchez

Source: El Sol de México