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.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to