While North America West Coast port volumes have started to contract sharply in the third quarter of 2022 both on a year-on-year and on an annualised basis compared to 2019, Sea-Intelligence said in a new report that this is not the same case for the North America East Coast ports.

It said on a year-on-year basis, laden inbound growth in Q3 2022 was between 4%-11%, and the annualised growth was between 7%-10%.

Total handling volumes also exhibited a similar growth trend, albeit shifted slightly downwards.

Sea Intelligence said there is also an increase in the laden export volumes, growing year-on-year for four consecutive months in September, which shows that the carriers are starting to clear out the laden export backlog a little more.

That said, the Danish maritime data analysis company, noted that empty exports are still growing at a rate of 17%-20% year-on-year when annualised against 2019.

 Source: Sea-Intelligence

Continuing volume shift to the East Coast cited

"There is also another key takeaway from our analysis, which is that there is a continuing volume shift from the West Coast to the East Coast ports, where handling volumes on either coast are closer to parity, whereas, in the past decade, North America West Coast ports have handled considerably more volumes than the East Coast ports," Sea-Intelligence added.

  Source: Sea-Intelligence

As shown in figure 2, the maritime analyst noted that a figure greater than 1 means more volumes are handled in the West Coast ports, and vice versa.