Europe "saves the day"

Container Trade Statistics have published container demand developments for January 2019, and in a rare twist it can be said that Europe "saves the day".

Overall it must be kept in mind that the shifting nature of Chinese New Year (CNY) always distorts year-on-year comparisons in both January and February. In 2019 CNY was on Feb 5th whereas it was on Feb 16th last year. This should result in an effect where the full pre-CNY rush impacts Jan 2019 but not Jan 2018 - in turn leading to the result that Jan 2019 should exhibit considerable growth compared to Jan 2018 simply due to the shift in CNY dates.

This is exactly what we see for European import data. Total European imports grew 8.6% year-on-year, making it the "winner" in terms of demand growth in January - much higher than the global average demand growth of just 2.7%. Incidentally a global growth rate which remains below the full year average for 2018 despite the CNY seasonal effect.

US import growth was a much lower 3.7% - not a very impressive figure when we again consider that the CNY effect should have given quite a boost with the rush being fully in January in 2019. A reasonable read of this development would be that this shows the effect of the pre-tarriff frontloading in Q4 2018 which will inevitable act as a dampener on growth in Q1 and possibly even Q2 of 2019.