"It's pretty much chaos right now," says DSV's Head of Air & Sea North America, Niels Larsen, to Danish business daily Børsen on the topic of the situation on the container market.

According to Marine Traffic, 37 vessels are currently anchored off the major ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. The DSV exec points out that the bottlenecks are getting "worse and worse right now."

"In several locations, holiday commodities are now being shipped off already, but there just isn't any room. So it's out of control at the moment," says Larsen to Børsen and adds that it might take upwards of five weeks to just have containers dispatched from the Port of Los Angeles once they have been offloaded from the vessels.

Last week, ShippingWatch reported that traffic pressure in major ports around the world means that 409 vessels loaded with a total of 2.7 million teu were still waiting in line to unload their cargo, according to shipping analyst firm VesselsValue.

Last week, figures released by the Port of Los Angeles showed that it had increased its handled volumes in July for the 12th consecutive month. According to executive director of the Port of Los Angeles Gene Seroka, the huge demand from US consumers meant that its biggest export was pure air - meaning empty containers.

"Our largest export commodity continues to be air as we reposition empty containers back to Asia," Seroka said in an update.

English Edit: Christoffer Østergaard

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