According to professional expert community, global transport logistics will be getting more and more containerized. Figures for the year 2017 prove this trend.
Container transportation has become the major shipping method in intercontinental directions due to a number of transportation and throughput conveniences. Container shipping is also growing in popularity in intracontinental directions.
According to the report of Drewry Container Trades Statistics (CTS), container volumes exceeded 39.5 million TEUs in the first quarter of 2017, which amounts to a 10-percent increase over the first quarter of 2016. Intraregional trade was the primary driver of growth. Trade volumes grew 17% against 7% for sea traffic.
In particular, China’s total container trade in the first quarter of 2017 made 2.6 million TEUs, which was 17% higher over the first quarter of the previous year, while China’s domestic traffic increased 28%.
Figures for rail container trade in Russia in the first 4 months of 2017 showed the increase of international container volume over domestic volume against the same period of the previous year. At the same time, domestic container traffic is growing rapidly – the total container trade increased 24% to 784 thousand TEUs, and the overall turnover grew 8.5% to 270 thousand TEUs.
Ukrainian carriers are steadily getting reoriented to containers. According to Ukrainian Railways (Ukrzaliznytsia), container traffic volume in 2017 will total 29% from the overall volume of rail cargo traffic, growing to 45% by 2021.
Sources: rzd-partner.ru, infranews.ru, sd.net.ua