Via the Financial Times, yet more evidence that supply chains are being moved from China:

The world’s largest shipping and logistics groups are locked in an increasingly intense rush to buy facilities in Asia in a bid to help their customers expand supply chains beyond China. Competition for assets has been fuelled by cash reserves that freight groups worldwide built up when disruption and increased ecommerce spending boosted demand for logistics services during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Businesses including German container carrier Hapag-Lloyd and Denmark-based AP Møller-Maersk have invested in ports, warehouses and other logistics infrastructure. The facilities support the increasingly complex supply chains developing between countries including Vietnam, India and Malaysia…

Executives said they were responding to western multinationals’ desire to reduce their reliance on China and establish back-up production lines. The trend was inspired by geopolitical rifts and disruptions during the pandemic.

But the executives warned that alternative manufacturing hubs across south and south-east Asia needed substantial investments…

Put another way, there’s still a long way to go.

Meanwhile, China retains a formidable advantage, despite its increasingly dangerous politics:

China continues to enjoy a substantial lead in the capacity of its freight infrastructure. Research group Drewry found earlier this year that China had 76 container terminals able to support large ships carrying more than 14,000 20-foot containers, the size most often used on trade routes between Asia and both Europe and North America. South and south-east Asian countries had just 31 between them.

Drewry researchers nevertheless expect the container capacity of south Asian ports to increase 31 per cent in the five years to 2027, compared with 14 per cent for ports globally.

Such expansion is underpinned by sharp increases in goods traffic from Asian countries other than China. Eric Reuter, Asia Pacific vice-president at Forto, said the Berlin-based freight forwarder had doubled the volume of exports it handled from Vietnam between 2021 and 2022.

As a timely reminder, here’s the Washington Post from last week:

Filipinos celebrated a victory this week after two of their supply ships managed to push through a blockade of Chinese coast guard vessels to deliver provisions to a small force of marines stationed on an unlikely ocean outpost. The men are camped in the rusting hulk of a World War II ship that has been resting on a feature called the Second Thomas Shoal (or Ayungin Shoal, as it’s known locally) ever since the Philippine navy beached it there years ago to assert Manila’s presence in the region.

This latest conflict between the two countries reflects the hotly contested status of the South China Sea, which China claims almost entirely as its own — based on a self-declared “nine-dash line” sketched on Chinese maps hundreds of miles east and south of its island province of Hainan. The line is hotly disputed by the six other nations and islands that border the sea, which is home to fisheries and shipping lanes of huge economic and strategic importance. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

That story, of course, is also a warning that, given Beijing’s ambitions, alternative supply chains dependent on uninterrupted passage through sea lanes in China’s vicinity (especially when the word “vicinity” is defined by China) may not be secure enough. This suggests that some “friendshoring” may need to be even closer to home or, even, home.