Press Room

NEOLINK Announcement – COVID 19 Outbreak in Zhejiang Province Adds Further Disruption to Ningbo Port – 20.12.21

Monday 20^th of December 2021

Dear Valued Clients,

Most of you will be aware that over the past two weeks COVID outbreaks have been emerging in Zhejiang province.

During this time, we have had multiple factories/suppliers of our customers have outbreaks and close down, as well as some in Zhenhai be impacted from a lockdown at the beginning of December.

The impact of these outbreak has been felt throughout the supply chain:

• Factories – shutting down or production slowing down (most EXW dates have been delayed by weeks in our system)
• Trucking – some companies/drivers are refusing to enter certain districts due to tough quarantine measurements/requirements being imposed on drivers.
• Port Operations – Ningbo’s port operations have also tightened restrictions on only allowing certain drivers from certain regions that have outbreaks – similarly this is also applied to workers at the terminals
• Shipping lines – As of five days ago; Loadstar and MarineTraffic sited 30 vessels were anchored and waiting to enter Ningbo Port, as of this morning at 11:34AM that number appears to have increased significantly in the past week (please see below)

The biggest issue we foresee in the coming weeks is another bottleneck appearing similar to what happened earlier on in the year that impacted all of China’s ports. We anticipate that over the course of the next week if the build-up occurs that shipping lines will start omitting the port entirely and as such will add further problems as we head into Chinese New Year.

Our team both here in Australia and in China are engaging continuously with the shipping lines to do our best to pre-empt any omissions, however these are typically made on the fly by the vessel captains which take time to report back. I also ask during this time you understand that our team do not get “official notices” from the shipping lines straight away when this occurs. We will always push for the official notices to assist with your customer communication, but we have noticed this can sometimes take weeks not days to receive.

If you have suppliers in the Zhejiang province with pending orders we are not aware of, I strongly advise you send over to our team as soon as possible, and we will work closely with you in the coming weeks to try to find a solution that suits your supply chain.

All of our team are working extremely hard going into Christmas/New Year with us only taking leave on public holidays to ensure we keep your supply chains moving. If you have concerns about existing or pending orders, please reach out to your NEOLINK Customer Operations contact and we will do everything we can to assist.

SOURCES:

• https://theloadstar.com/factories-shut-and-ningbo-restricts-truckers-in-zhejiang-province-lockdowns/
• https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/shipping/120721-ningbo-port-could-see-disruption-as-zhenhai-district-goes-into-14-day-lockdown-sources
• https://splash247.com/another-lockdown-at-ningbo-has-exporters-on-edge/
• https://gcaptain.com/new-ningbo-lockdown-shows-covid-threat-hanging-over-supply-chains/

Best regards,

NEOLINK Marketing Team