DHL Warns Supply Chain Won’t Recover to Pre-Covid Days in 2023
- Conditions are improving, but will take more time: Scharwath
- More goods heading to US and Europe ahead of year-end holidays
DHL delivery trailers in the loading bay at a sorting office in Berlin, Germany.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Port congestion should ease next year as new container vessels are delivered and demand from shippers softens from pandemic highs, but not enough to restore global supply-chain flows to where they were before Covid, according to the head of DHL’s freight-forwarding unit.
“It’s going to ease in 2023, but it’s not going to go back to 2019,” DHL Global Forwarding, Freight Chief Executive Officer Tim Scharwath said in an interview Wednesday. “I don’t think we’re going to go back to this overcapacity situation where rates were very low. Infrastructure, especially in the US, isn’t going to get better overnight, because infrastructure developments take a long time.”