Container shortage will last for another four months until 2021  

In recent months, the distribution of containers in the world is seriously uneven, with serious shortage in some regions and serious overstock in some countries.
Textainer and Triton, two of the world's top three container equipment leasing companies, both say the shortage will continue in the coming months.
According to Textainer, a container equipment leasing company, the supply and demand of containers will not return to balance until mid-February next year, and container shortages will last until after the 2021 Spring Festival.

Shippers will have to be patient and may have to pay extra for at least five or six months of shipping the goods by sea. The rebound in the container market has pushed shipping costs to record levels, and that seems to be continuing, particularly on trans-Pacific routes from Asia to Long Beach and Los Angeles.
Since July, a combination of factors has pushed up prices, severely affecting the balance between supply and demand, and ultimately leaving shippers with high shipping costs, too few voyages, insufficient container equipment and very low on-time shipping rates.
One key factor has been a shortage of containers, prompting Maersk and Hapelot to tell customers it could take some time to get back into balance.

San Francisco-based Textainer is one of the world's leading container leasing companies and the largest seller of used containers. It specialises in sourcing, leasing and reselling oversea cargo containers, renting them out to more than 400 shippers. Philippe Wendling, the company's senior vice-president of marketing, thinks the container shortage could last for another four months, until February.

Container production is insufficient

"Our forecast is that equilibrium will not return until mid-February after the Lunar New Year. Container production has not kept pace with the sudden increase in demand. Chinese container producers are producing about 300,000 TEUs a month at their peak and their plants are running at full capacity." Wendling said.
However, for a variety of reasons, the gap remains wide. Annual container production in 2019 is 2.5 million TEUs. That may sound like a lot, but it actually only covers the number of containers lost or scrapped, or old containers sold for storage and other purposes. Notably, more than 4 million TEU left the plant the previous year, which is partly indicative of the low production in 2019.
In the first half of 2020, shipping lines ordered very few containers and delayed contracts because they believed that seaborn demand would decrease after the Covid-19 outbreak, and the global container fleet was small when transport demand resumed in July.
Leasers such as Textainer and Triton make 55 per cent of the containers in the world's liner fleet, which lease them out to customers, the shipping lines.
In this regard, leasing companies' forecasts give a clear indication of where the market is headed. Shipping lines buy the remaining 45 percent directly from manufacturers.
Wendling explained that the price increase has pushed up the price of boxes sold by manufacturers, who typically charge around $2,000 / TEU, and thus higher contract costs for lessors.
Triton, a container leasing company, made a point very similar to Textainer's forecast at an investor presentation in September. The Conference issued a report which summarized as follows:
"Triton pre.

The combination of container shortages and port congestion adds another barrier to boxes that need to be repositioned, leading shippers and freight forwarders to criticize the service provided by carriers.
Dominique von Orelli, Global head of shipping at DHL Global Forwarding, points to the problem, with freight forwarders facing the same experience.
"Some shipping lines are now unloading containers from Asia-Europe routes and intra-Asian routes in order to deploy them to some extent on higher-yielding routes such as trans-Pacific and Latin America."
"Based on this, we have observed container shortages on Asia-Europe routes and delays in some areas."