From Yantian (鹽田) to Hamburg, world trade is in the doldrums and Christian Blauert, who heads the largest container terminal in Germany’s northern port of Hamburg, need only check the Web cams to knows things aren’t getting better.
On his computer he has access to a live-feed of pictures from Chinese harbors like Yantian showing mountains of empty containers, waiting for exports to pick up.
“The situation in the international port of Yantian is typical,” referring to the site near Hong Kong. “You can hardly see the full containers because the terminals are crowded with empties.”
The pictures illustrate that when the container ships come steaming into Hamburg from China, in six to seven weeks’ time after going round Africa to save paying Suez Canal transit fees, they will be carrying far fewer TV sets, bicycles, T-shirts and toothbrushes than at the same time last year.
At the HHLA (Hamburger Hafen und Logistik Aktiengesellschaft) Burchardkai terminal, where giant cranes on rails dominate the skyline, Blauert declines to say when business might pick up.
“It’s like navigating in the fog, you can only see what’s just ahead,” he says.
His firm expects turnover to be down by more than 10 percent this year because of the economic downturn and a number of HHLA’s 3,700 Hamburg employees will be facing short-time work as of this summer.
Axel Gedashko, economy minister in the city-state about 100km down river from the North Sea, does not mince his words: “The situation is dramatic,” he says.
“Trade in volume in the port of Hamburg is down by a quarter compared to last year” when nearly 10 million TEU (twenty foot equivalent unit), the figure used for calculating the number of containers shipped, went through the harbor, Gedashko says.
Shipping these days in Hamburg — Germany’s largest port and Europe’s second-largest after Rotterdam — is all about containers because 97 percent of goods are moved that way.
China was Hamburg’s most important trading partner last year, accounting for 32 percent in volume of the 140 million tonnes shipped through the port. Singapore came second, followed by Russia.
The world crisis “is hitting us badly because the port is at the center of logistics for northern Germany,” Gedashko says.
“And the situation here reflects the state of the world economy, not just in Hamburg and Germany, but for the whole of eastern Europe” because Hamburg, especially since the fall of the Iron Curtain, serves as the gateway for much of central and northern Europe, he says.
In this city-state of 1.8 million people, unemployment is up to 78,000, including 10,000 in the logistics sector, with at least 30,000 more on short-time, Gedashko says.
The city is worried. A poll by the Haspa bank showed 30 percent of firms connected with the harbor expect a bad year, 60 percent stagnation and just 6 percent think business will be good.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS