SIMIC

Many goods can't be shipped out, said Fang Xueyu, vice president of international marketing and general manager for Asia-Pacific at Chinese home appliance company Hisense.

The cost of shipping containers has climbed five-fold from about US$3,000 to as much as US$15,000 each, while it takes about a week longer for them to get to Europe, she said.

From the Suez Canal congestion in March to the re-emergence of Covid cases around a major Chinese export hub in Guangzhou in June, logistical disruptions have hit global trade one after the other.

"What you have in Europe, what you have around the world, I wouldn't call it chaos, but a lot of disturbances in the logistics system," said Alexander Klose, executive vice president of overseas operations at Chinese electric car start-up Aiways.

"So we had to rebook shifts, we had to delay shifts, because no ships were available, no containers were available. That definitely impacted us," he said.

For the company, which makes its cars in China and sells them to Europe, Klose said the disruptions "delayed some shipments by two, three months just because cars were sitting in a port and not being transported."

Foreign demand for Chinese-made products has remained strong - both by companies' accounts and official data. The customs agency said in the first half of the year, exports to the European Union rose 35.9 per cent from a year ago to US$233 billion, while those to the US climbed 42.6 per cent to $252.86 billion.