Chinese New Year is set by the lunar calendar, so the date moves each year between late January and the middle of February. Planning has to start from that year's actual date rather than from a fixed month. The public holiday itself is the smaller part of the disruption. Factories stop before it, a large share of the manufacturing workforce travels home, and production restarts in stages rather than all at once, so the effective shutdown is longer at both ends than the official calendar suggests. Truckers, container yards, CFS warehouses and customs brokers are all affected in parallel, which is why a booking that looks confirmed can still fail on the origin leg.
The weeks ahead of the holiday are the tightest part of the cycle. Every exporter is trying to clear finished goods before the line stops, demand for space rises against fixed capacity, rates firm, and bookings get rolled. The binding constraint at this point is frequently not vessel or train space at all — it is trucking availability at the factory, slot bookings at the terminal, and labour at the consolidation warehouse for LCL cargo. Booking earlier only helps if the cargo-ready date moves earlier with it, so confirm cargo readiness with the supplier in writing and treat a verbal assurance given in the last week before the holiday as optimistic.
Customs and documentation deserve separate attention because they cannot be caught up later. Government offices run reduced services over the holiday, and anything that requires a third party to act — an inspection, a fumigation certificate, a certificate of origin issued by a chamber, a classification query on a contested HS code, a licence or permit for a controlled commodity — stops when those offices stop. A declaration held for inspection on the last working day stays held until staff return. Finalise commercial invoices, packing lists, HS classifications and origin documents well before the window rather than sending cargo towards a border with paperwork still in progress.
After the restart, two things happen in sequence. First, departures are thin for a period while volumes rebuild and carriers withdraw capacity that was laid on for the pre-holiday surge. Then a backlog clears in a compressed burst as factories that restarted at partial staffing reach normal output and release accumulated orders at once. Empty container availability at inland depots is often the visible symptom of the first phase, and terminal and trucking congestion the symptom of the second. Quality also deserves a mention: output from the first production runs after a long shutdown is worth inspecting with more care than usual.
The practical method is to build the calendar backwards from the date you have promised your customer, not forwards from the date the factory says it will finish. Work back through delivery, customs clearance at destination, main leg transit, origin customs and haulage, and cargo readiness, then compare the result with the holiday window. Where the arithmetic does not close, the usual levers are splitting the order so part of it ships early, pre-positioning stock in bonded or un-bonded warehousing, or moving the urgent portion by a faster mode while the balance follows by sea. Cargo insurance is worth reviewing at the same time, since goods sit in storage longer during this period.
We work across air, sea, rail, road and multimodal routings, which means the mode can be changed for part of an order without changing forwarder mid-plan. Send us your cargo-ready dates, required delivery windows and the SKUs that genuinely cannot wait, and we will map them against the holiday calendar and reply within one business day.
