Gavin Maguire, Muyu Xu & Xie YU

(Reuters] – After the government banned firms from publishing real-time data, investors, traders and logistics professionals are facing the most difficult test of their patience as they try to monitor China’s economy.

China’s largest city is struggling to recover from the weeks-long coronavirus curtails. Companies can not see where goods are going due to a new data law, which has restricted data sharing.

Industrial barometers were available at all ports before, and provided a quick window onto the world’s second biggest economy. They could be used to measure crude oil inventories at port import terminals or high-frequency container throughput in ports.

But since China’s Personal Information Protection Law went into effect in November, crucial sources of information about the world’s biggest exporting nation have gone dark.

Brokers and shipping companies have turned to satellite-based tracking for less precise monitoring of port delays. It is impossible to obtain traffic data that can be used to measure truck shipping or commerce. Traders can track port activity using phone calls, or hand counting ships.

This lack of visibility can affect all other links in China’s global-spanning supply chain. As work slowly resumes, goods flow increases and shippers attempt to clear congestion off China’s east coast.

Dong Chen of Pictet Wealth Management, Asia macroeconomic research head, stated that “we are not able to get some of the higher-frequency data like daily cargo turnover at ports and railways, as well as passenger data,”

Chen stated that some of the data was now only available on a monthly basis. Chen said, “We have to just deal with it as it is.”

Requests for comments on the impact of the law were not answered by the Cyberspace Administration of China or the Ministry of Transport.

Container, oil tanker & dry bulk vessels crowd off China’s coast https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/ce/lbpgnynbnvq/ChinaVesselsApr202022.png

DARK

PwC has called the new data law “one the most rigorous regulatory regimes multinationals may encounter.” These measures restrict the ability of domestic and foreign organizations to collect and use data. They affect all companies operating in China.

Organizations that monitor China’s industrial or commercial activity must adhere to strict guidelines regarding the classification of data, storage and transparency.

Data providers may have stopped publishing or moved their data behind pay walls as a result.

One Beijing-based oil trader stated that while everyone talks about China’s congestion, there is not much data.

COVID was a pandemic that struck China two years ago. Journalists, analysts and investors turned to TomTom traffic data for information on how restrictions impeded mobility in major cities of China’s largest country.

It’s not happening right now. China cities do not appear on the free company’s international traffic congestion webpage, which tracks data for many other places around the globe.

Ivo Bokkerink, a TomTom spokesperson, stated via email that “We made the business decision not to provide historical or live traffic data for Chinese cities using our TomTom Move Portal/Traffic Index website” because the Chinese law regarding the disclosure and sharing of GPS data had been tightened.

He said that TomTom will continue to offer data to Chinese subscribers.

Since shipping companies no longer publish Automatic Identification System (AIS), feeds about ships in Chinese waters have been discontinued by traders and other ship tracking professionals who use satellite-based position data. This can sometimes be more accurate than ship to ship AIS signals.

“I’d say last year we were talking to people a few times per month” to supplement data on supply chain developments, said Ivan Lam, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research. “But the past few weeks it’s been daily.”

Some people have chosen to go back to school.

Stephen Innes (Managing Partner at SPI Asset Management) stated that “Real-time, data-driven, decision-making is at the core of what we do for our living these days,”

We are now reliant on people to manually count the ships in and out of Shanghai and Ningbo Ports at 7:05 p.m. each day for reference points.