Port operations in the southern province of Guangdong are facing disruptions related to a local resurgence of COVID-19 in May, raising concerns over the long-term development of China’s export services.

The province’s Yantian port has been operating at around half-capacity after the emergence of an infection cluster late last month. Cargo suppliers reassigned some of their work to alternative ports in Shekou and Nansha, resulting in delivery trucks building up at the entrances since last week.

Container truck drivers said they had to spend more than 6 hours in the queue due to COVID-19 measures. For example, they needed to show their nucleic acid test reports, go through temperature screening at the port entrance and scan their health codes to prove they were safe to enter the facilities.

In extreme cases, some drivers could not enter the port because, after spending hours or even staying overnight in the queue, their test results had expired. Yet these drivers could not turn around and leave the area as there were vehicles behind that had joined the line.

The bottlenecks had driven up logistics costs from 900 yuan to 2,800 yuan (from US$141 to US$438) per container, said Li Mingyang, the managing director of Zhongshan-based Letu Electrical Appliance, in an interview with mainland Chinese economic news website Yichai.

A logistics industry insider said other costs had been increasing recently, such as in storage, container movements and charges payable due to service delays. Transport costs between China and the United States were also on the rise, for example, from Nansha to Chicago, and from Shekou to Cleveland.

The higher shipping costs could undermine China’s success in securing more export orders during the pandemic, the source said.

AVC Revo managing director Chen Wei told Yichai that if the situation worsened, more eastern Chinese ports could get congested. Chinese companies might face cash flow issues if the delivery delays persisted, which could in turn affect product sales over the Black Friday season in the second half of the year, Chen said.

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