The chaos that has bedeviled global supply chains in recent months will extend into next year, with a lack of truck drivers preventing hundreds of container vessels from offloading goods around the world, shipping group Maersk said.

“The whole system has become one gigantic bottleneck,” Chief Executive Soren Skou told reporters on Tuesday.

Skou said the most significant problem preventing containers from leaving ports is a lack of labour, particularly drivers of heavy goods vehicles in the United States and Britain, despite raising salaries “significantly”.

Three hundred container vessels are lying idle outside ports, Skou said after Maersk reported robust third-quarter earnings on the back of record freight prices driven by the supply chain problems as the global economy recovers from the coronavirus crisis. (Media Reports)