Port of New York/New Jersey volumes slip in April

The bi-state port complex saw throughput of both loaded imports and exports decline both on a monthly and year-over-year basis, according to recent data from the port authority.   The Port of New York and New Jersey saw container cargo volumes slip 3 percent in April 2016 compared to the same month in 2015.
   The port’s terminals handled a total of 489,311 TEUs during the month, also down 5.5 percent from March.
   Loaded import container volumes fell 2.6 percent year-over-year to 244,677 TEUs in April, while exports of laden containers dropped 8.1 percent to 114,824 TEUs. The remaining containers handled by the bi-state port were empty, either outbound or inbound.
   In the first four months of 2016, the port has handled 1,985,664 TEUs of containerized cargo, including imports, exports and empties, 1 percent fewer than in the same 2015 period. Comparisons with last year are tempered, however, by cargo diversions that resulted from congestion issues at West Coast ports.
   Port complexes across California and the Pacific Northwest in early 2015 suffered from work slowdowns and stoppages during contentious labor contract negotiations between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and employers represented by the Pacific Maritime Association. As a result, some shippers sent Asian cargoes through the Panama Canal to East Coast gateways in order to avoid the bottleneck out west.
   When the new dockworker contract was in place and the dust had settled, cargo owners returned the majority of shipments to their traditional east-west routes, causing East Coast volumes to fall.
  “Everyone was filling up all these special ships to go to the East Coast to take pressure off of the West Coast” Walter Kemmsies, a port economist with real-estate firm JLL Inc., told the Wall Street Journal. “I don’t think we’ll be able to do a clean comparison until August.”
   The port’s ExpressRail intermodal railyards, on the other hand, reported a 5.6 percent increase in throughput, handling 44,984 containers of all sizes in April. Those figures were still down 6.4 percent from March though.