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Container port in Qingdao, China: maintaining supply chains
Photo: VCG / imago images
The logistics companies experienced the dreaded Brexit chaos shortly before the Brexit implementation.
On the English Channel, the dividing line between Great Britain and the continent, chaos reigned in the penultimate week of December.
Trucks jammed in seemingly endless queues in front of the port of Dover and on the grounds of a disused airport.
Many drivers didn't make it home before Christmas.
Continental Europe had closed without further ado when it became known that an allegedly highly contagious coronavirus mutation had spread in Britain.
Will these super jams repeat themselves in January, now that Great Britain is leaving the internal market and the EU customs union?
The actual Brexit was almost a year ago.
But now everyone can see what it means.
There will be customs and goods controls, at least on the way into a united Europe.
And so it is already clear: 2021 will again be exhausting for the logisticians.
Shaped by Brexit and also slowed down by the virus.
Overall, boatmen, truckers and railroad workers, aircraft captains and parcel carriers, dispatchers and managers achieved great things in the past year.
They had to deliver in the midst of various lockdowns in spring, summer, autumn and winter.
Transporting protective clothing, food, notebooks or car parts around the globe, right up to factory gates and front doors.
Supplying billions of people, maintaining multinational supply chains.
Make sure that the economy and everyday life continue to run in a reasonably regular manner.
And: they almost always delivered.
Container ships full to the brim
At first it didn't look like it.
In January, central ports in China suddenly came to a standstill, and in March European countries closed their borders in rows, even with friendly neighboring countries.
For a short time everything seemed blocked.
But the Chinese soon started again, the Europeans quickly agreed, under the leadership of the EU, on free travel for freight traffic.
Some airlines converted passenger planes that they no longer needed to carry masks or other urgently needed medical supplies instead.
And then in the autumn world trade in industrial and consumer goods suddenly picked up so strongly that many container ships were full to the brim and freight rates broke long-standing records.
“It was a strange year,” says Hapag-Lloyd boss Rolf Habben Jansen.
But also a highly profitable year for many companies.
2021 will also be special.
Now vaccines have to be transported around the world: billions of cans, some in refrigerated containers that can store 70 degrees below zero, sometimes to the remotest corners of the planet.
On water, on land, in the air.
How quickly and how safely and how many people can be vaccinated depends largely on the transport companies.
Whether they deliver again, like in 2020.
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