Central Visaya shipping sector posts encouraging trend in Q1

CEBU, Philippines — The shipping industry in Central Visayas posted an encouraging trend in the first quarter of 2021, compared to the last quarter of 2020, as travel restrictions in different ports of call in the region started to ease up.

The National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA-7) report indicated that the shipping industry continued to recover in the first quarter of 2021 as all areas, may it be shipcalls, passenger, cargo and container traffic, recorded increased activities from their performances in the 4th quarter. Their levels however remain below pre-COVID levels.

From a total of 793 thousand passengers arriving in different port of calls within the region in the last quarter of 2020, it went up to 1.14 million passengers in the first quarter this year.

While cargo maintained considerable load volume even at the height of the lockdown, surprisingly it went down slightly in the first quarter this year to 253 thousand twenty-foot-equivalent-unit (TEU) in 2021 first three month, from 257 thousand TEU in the last quarter 2020.

According to NEDA-7 the shortage of space in cargo vessels caused the reduction of cargo volume in the first quarter of 2020.

The report further revealed that there are also indications of shipping rates likely to go up within the year which could weigh down on the subsector’s performance.

Number of shipcalls logged in first quarter stood at 26,236 an increase from the fourth quarter’s 23,848. However, this is a reduction of 50.2 percent compared to the first quarter of 2020 at 52,706, which is a pre-pandemic period.