SoCal ports cargo volumes continue downward slide

SoCal ports cargo volumes continue downward slide Steadily declining cargo volume fortunes of the nation's two busiest container ports continued unabated through June, signaling that a long-predicted second-half volume upturn in TEU numbers might be slow in coming.
   Container volumes at the Port of Long Beach dropped 12.5 percent in June compared to the year-ago period, while the neighboring Port of Los Angeles reported a one-month 11.7 percent drop in volumes over June 2007.
   June marks the 14th monthly decline for Los Angeles in the past 16 months. The Los Angeles port has not recorded a monthly increase of more than 1 percent since February 2007.
   Next door, Long Beach has reported month-to-month declines for eight of the past nine months, however the one non-declining month, December 2007, registered a statistically insignificant increase of 0.02 percent.
   Total numbers for the first six-months of 2008 also registered significant drops for the two ports.
   Long Beach, the nation's second-busiest port, reported an 8.7 percent decline during the first six months of 2007, while the Los Angeles port, the nation's No. 1 container port, recorded a 6.76 percent slide.
   Despite the declines, the two ports remain the busiest container ports in the Western Hemisphere, far outpacing third-ranked New York-New Jersey.
   The Long Beach and Los Angeles ports, after more than a decade of strong, sometimes double-digit growth, began to slip last year, with combined volumes virtually unchanged from 2006 to 2007.
   Analysts have projected since the start of the year that the two ports' volumes would register a significant upturn during the second half of the year, which would offset projections of a dismal first half. However, the first half declines have turned out to be much higher than any of the projections for the first part of the year estimated.
   In May, a 64-page study by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp. predicted that the neighboring ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles would record a 1 percent increase in container volumes for all of 2008, rising from a collective 15.7 million TEUs reported last year to 15.8 million TEUs at the end of this year.
   However, the ports are 553,000 TEUs behind last year's pace. To overcome the declines in the first half of this year and break even at the end of 2008, the two ports would each have to move an average of 725,000 TEUs per month for the remainder of the year. However, the Port of Long Beach has never recorded more than 675,000 TEUs moved in a single month. The Port of Los Angeles has surpassed 725,000 TEUs in a single month nine times in its history, with a single month record of 800,000 TEUs in October 2006. However, the Los Angeles port has not broken 700,000 TEUs per month since November 2007.
   One bright spot for the ports has been a surge in exported containers, as foreign purchasing of U.S. goods continues to boom with the near record low value of the dollar on the world market. However, even the growth in exports through the two ports appears to be slowing.
   In April, Long Beach reported exported container volumes up 29 percent during the first four months of the year. By June, exported container volume numbers for the first six months had fallen slightly to a 25 percent increase over the first six months of 2007.
      Los Angeles reported a 22 percent increase in exported container during the first four months of the year compared to the same period in 2007. However, by June the number had fallen to a six-month total of 10.95 percent compared to the first six months of last year.