As lockdown eased in spring 2021, businesses found it hard — and costly — to get supplies. The cost of renting shipping containers rose by 175% between May 2020 and May 2021. Getting them transported from China to the UK rose from $50 to $200 per metric tonne between 2019 and 2021.The supply issues were made worse by the 2-week blockage of the Suez Canal in March 2021, when a supertanker ran aground.
UK building materials firm Howdens Joinery found a clever solution. Instead of shipping goods from China, it put them on the train. A goods-by-rail route to the UK had opened from China in 2017. For the first time goods could be loaded in China and unloaded, 12,000km and 18 days later, in the UK. This may sound a long time, but transporting goods by ship takes 40 days, so Howdens was able to obtain an advantage over its rivals, speeding up deliveries to its customers.
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