Drewry: Market share continues to shift to USEC ports in 2017

Ports on the U.S. East and Gulf coasts have been nabbing market share from their West Coast counterparts for the last five years, but that trend accelerated last year following the 2016 opening of the expanded Panama Canal.    U.S. East and Gulf Coast ports continued to capture market share from their West Coast counterparts in 2017, according to London-based maritime shipping consultancy Drewry.
   Drewry said in the latest edition of its Container Insight Weekly that ports on the East and Gulf coasts saw their import volumes from Asia jump 7.9 percent last year compared to a 1.3 percent growth rate on the West Coast, according to data from PIERS.
   As a result of the strong growth, U.S. East and Gulf coast ports increased their share of the market from 33 percent in 2016 to 34.4 percent in 2017, Drewry said, attributing the growth in large part to the 2016 opening of the expanded Panama Canal.
   “The shift in the coastal balance eastward has been a constant trend in the past five years, but having slowed in 2016 it reasserted itself last year following the expansion of the Panama Canal mid-2016 that spurred lines to upgrade ships on that route,” the firm wrote.
   “The immediate outlook for U.S. West Coast ports, which have lost approximately 7 points market share over the past six years, is not promising and they are unlikely to be able to arrest the decline anytime soon, although with a large gateway market on their doorstep, they should be able to keep the lion’s share of traffic for a number of years yet,” Drewry added.
   Looking ahead to 2018, Drewry said it is projecting another strong year for eastbound transpacific trade volumes, which the firm estimates rose 6 percent compared with 2016, but that the growth rate would decelerate to around 4.5 percent year-over-year, “with East and Gulf coasts taking further bites out of the West coast’s dominance.”