Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been considerable focus on the concept of nearshoring where production is brought closer to the consumers, countervailing the strong trend of production offshoring seen over the previous decades. However, does data support such a trend of increasing nearshoring? This should therefore show up as a reduction in the average sailing distances, says the latest update from Sea-Intelligence. The graph (right) shows the average sailing distances of containers imported into North America and Europe. For North America, we see that the sailing distance has increased compared to a pre-pandemic baseline, hence giving no support to the notion of nearshoring.
