What's Happening at West Coast Ports in September 2024?
The Pacific Merchant Shipping Association’s West Coast Trade Report is a monthly publication that monitors container traffic through 25 North American seaports, twenty in the United States, three in Canada, and two on Mexico’s West Coast. Unlike other reports, the TEU tallies cited here are the actual statistics compiled by the ports themselves, not estimates based on proprietary models or algorithms.
Here's what the professional forecasters have been saying about September. The National Retail Federation’s Global Port Tracker (NRF/GPT) expects that September will see the arrival of 2.29 million inbound loaded TEUs, which would be up 12.9% from a year earlier. Descartes Global Systems, meanwhile, anticipates that September’s traffic in inbound loads will amount to 2,520,935 TEUs, a 14.4% gain over September 2023.
Here are the container trade statistics major North America’s seaports have reported so far for September, in their own numbers. As usual, figures for the Port of New York/New Jersey were not available by our publication deadline.
The Port of Los Angeles processed 497,803 inbound loads in September, a 26.8% year-over-year jump that was more consistent with the industry narrative that shippers had been shifting cargo away from strike-imperiled East and Gulf Coast ports. During the third quarter, the port handled 1,508,447 inbound loads, the most in any third quarter in the port’s history. Outbound loads (114,702) were down 4.9% from a year earlier and 12.3% below the volume of outbound loads in September 2019. Total container traffic YTD through America’s busiest seaport (7,586,395) was up 7.0% from the same period in 2019.
At Southern California’s Port of Long Beach, inbound loads in September (416,999 TEUs) were up just 2.0% from a year earlier, a remarkably small gain given the prevailing maritime industry narrative depicting a massive diversion of containerized shipments to U.S. West Coast (USWC) ports to avoid the threatened strike at ports along the East and Gulf Coasts that was due to start on September 30. Similarly, total container traffic this September (829,499) was up a mere 70 TEUs from the previous September. Outbound loads (88,289) were down by 12.8% from last September. However, total container traffic through the port in this year’s first nine months (6,917,373) represented a 21.8% increase in total volume over the same period in 2019.
The Port of Oakland was the first major port to post its September TEU numbers. The San Francisco Bay Area port handled 82,180 inbound loads in the year’s ninth month, a 10.4% bump over the same month last year but still 3.2% shy of pre-pandemic September of 2019. The 61,466 outbound loads shipped from the port in September represented a year-over-year gain of 2.9%. Still, this September’s outbound volume was down 14.7% from September 2019. Total container traffic through the port (loads and empties) through the first nine months of the year amounted to 1,704,977 TEUs, 10.5% below the volume handled in the same period in 2019.
Up at the Northwest Seaport Alliance Ports of Tacoma and Seattle, the 135,841 loaded import TEUs handled by the two ports were up just 0.9% from a year earlier, while export loads (57,275) were down 7.4% year-over-year and down 30.3% from the 82,148 export loads the NWSA ports handled in September 2019. Total container traffic so far this year (2,472,421) was up 0.9% from a year earlier but down 15.0% from the volume recorded in the same nine-month period in 2019.
Across the border in British Columbia, the Port of Vancouver discharged 152,225 inbound loads in September, a 9.2% year-over-year gain but down 2.6% from the same month in 2019. Outbound loads this September (69,566) were up 8.4% from a year earlier but remained 23.0% shy of the volume achieved in September 2019. Total container moves YTD through Canada’s largest seaport (2,380,129) were off by 8.3% from the same period in 2019.