Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運) on Tuesday said it expects a rebound in its cargo volume in the third quarter after facing an up to 20 percent plunge in the first half of the year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, as uncertainties remain in the fourth quarter, the company’s annual cargo volume might fall 15 percent year-on-year for the whole of this year, the nation’s largest cargo shipper said.
While the pandemic has decelerated economic activity worldwide and weakened demand in the global container shipping market, Evergreen saw demand pick up earlier this month and has received more orders for next month and August, company chairman Anchor Chang (張正鏞) told a news briefing in Taipei.
Photo: Bloomberg
Summer is traditionally the cargo shipping industry’s peak season, as many suppliers transport their goods for clients ahead of product launches.
“The cargo volume in the third quarter is likely to be flat from last year, but it would be a decent performance considering the effects of the pandemic,” Chang said. “It is difficult to see annual growth in volume this year, as global trade declines and consumption slows due to lockdown measures.”
The world’s three major container shipping alliances — the Alliance, 2M Alliance and Ocean Alliance — have reduced their capacity amid the outbreak to address oversupply in the industry, which helps shippers maintain load factors and curb declines in freight rates, Evergreen executive vice president Patrick Wei (魏維德) said.
A reduction in capacity would have a mixed effect on shippers’ financial performance, as it would lead to a drop in revenue while saving their operational costs, such as fuel and labor costs, Wei said.
Most shippers in the past few months have performed maintenance on their idle vessels, while Evergreen has equipped its idle vessels with scrubbers to reduce emissions and meet new International Maritime Organization regulations, Wei said.
“It is questionable whether most shippers would continue trimming capacity in the fourth quarter when the cargo demand recovers, but if all shippers return to full capacity, the oversupply issue would emerge again,” he said.
For Evergreen, revenue generated from the Asia-Europe route and the Asia-US route accounts for 65 percent of its total revenue.
A second wave of COVID-19 in the West could complicate fourth-quarter visibility for cargo volume, he said.
The shipper has reported no infections among its crews, saying that it bars them from disembarking when arriving at any port and does not allow families aboard.
Evergreen also routinely takes its crews’ temperatures and orders them to self-isolate before boarding, it said.
The company added that it has extended contracts with crew members who could not return home due to border restrictions.
“This is a challenging year for shippers,” Chang said.
Evergreen reported a net loss of NT$441.3 million (US$14.89 million) for the first quarter, after revenue fell 4.86 percent year-on-year to NT$43.48 billion.
Net loss per share was NT$0.09 in the first quarter, compared with earnings per share of NT$0.12 a year earlier.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS