All You Need to Know About the Chinese Golden Week

How It Impacts Ocean Freight and How You Can Prepare

The Chinese National Day is celebrated on October 1^st and commemorates the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Similarly to the Lunar New Year, almost all companies, including factories, are closed for business during one week. This unparalleled event bears significant repercussions on Ocean Freight.

Port activity is maintained and customs offices remain open during the Golden Week in China. Individual DHL Global Forwarding stations will also arrange on-duty staff in order to handling urgent cases.

The Chinese Golden Week impacts Ocean Freight Shippers for two main reasons:

• All Chinese factories are closed during the Golden Week, undoubtedly impacting just-in-time supply chains and logistics operations.
  
• Ocean carriers generally omit sailings during this period.

International shippers have since adapted their operations and anticipate the closures: they ship out their cargo in the weeks prior, causing what is sometimes referred to as the pre-Golden week rush.

The disruptions induced by the Golden week start long before the holiday is celebrated. A pre-Golden Week volume surge can be observed each year two or three weeks prior to the National Day.

Ocean freight shippers see themselves caught in the crossfire of two major factors:

• In anticipation of factory closedowns described above, manufacturers must fulfill their customers’ demands ahead of the week-long break.
• The weeks leading up to the Golden Week trigger the start of the Christmas volume surge. The Christmas season starts early for Ocean Freight!

The rush does not only come down to container vessels and manufacturing activities. All other logistics activities, including freight forwarding, naturally see an activity peak as well two to three weeks before the holiday and up to a few days thereafter.

This year, the general pre-Golden week rush is further fueled by the market driven surge in volume, already putting stress on global supply chains with pressure on capacity, equipment shortages in many ports, frequent blank sailings and port congestion in several important ports across Asia.

This is expected to lead to an even higher pressure pre-Golden week and shippers are encouraged to work in advance to secure the necessary space and book early, at least 3-4 weeks in advance.

Volume surges are not necessarily observed in other South-East Asian countries as a consequence of the Golden Week. That does not mean to say that they are not impacted by the holiday.

The pre-Golden Week rush and a subsequent backlog of orders to fulfil impacts all the major Asia-Pacific services.