Saturday, October 24, 2026
The news that moves freight
Air Oct 24, 2026 · 7 min read

Champi grounds Taiwan’s freighters and closes customs for four days

Champi grounds 75 freighters at Taoyuan as Taiwan shuts customs until Tuesday. Taoyuan airport cancelled 596 flights before 9am on Friday 23 October, 75 of them cargo flights (Focus Taiwan/CNA). Customs is shut, and Monday is a holiday: a four-day pause (SEKO). Our view: the air backlog matters most this week. Dimerco said in July that AI cargo had filled the Taipei hub “to capacity”. Our call: Taiwan air exports held from 23 October will not all fly before Friday 30 October. We also expect Shanghai and Ningbo terminals to halt at least partly for 12 hours or more by Sunday 25 October.

Champi grounds 75 freighters at Taoyuan and leaves Taiwan exporters a four-day gap

Typhoon Champi caused 977 flight cancellations across Taiwan from Thursday 22 October to 10am Friday 23 October. That is the count from Taiwan’s Civil Aviation Administration, reported by Focus Taiwan, the English service of the Central News Agency (CNA). Of those, 262 were domestic and 715 were international or cross-strait flights.

Taoyuan International Airport is the island’s main cargo gateway. It cancelled 596 flights between midnight and 9am on Friday alone: 521 passenger flights and 75 cargo flights.

Our view is simple. For forwarders, Champi’s biggest cost this week is Taiwan air freight, not ships. It is also the cost that will last longest after the wind drops. Champi is forecast to make landfall in Kyushu, not Taiwan (Seoul Economic Daily). That makes no difference to a shipper whose cargo sat in a closed customs system for four days.

Four days, not one

The flight count is only half the story. The calendar is the other half.

Taiwan suspended government offices and work on 23 October in every municipality except Kinmen County, according to SEKO Logistics’ update at 10:00 Hong Kong time that day. Customs and financial markets were suspended across almost all of Taiwan.

Monday 26 October is Retrocession Day, a public holiday. SEKO puts it plainly: shippers face a four-day operational bottleneck, from 23 to 26 October. SEKO’s own Taiwan office closed on 23 October and reopens on Tuesday 27 October.

In our reading, the real loss is two working days, Friday and Monday, on either side of a weekend. Cargo that should have been cleared and flown on Friday will now meet Tuesday’s normal flow at the same time.

Airlines are cutting long-haul flying, which is where much of the cargo travels. Passenger planes carry freight in the hold, known as belly cargo. Focus Taiwan reported that EVA Air said “all of its long-haul flights between Taiwan and Europe or the United States later Friday had been canceled”. Starlux said it would operate only its long-haul flights to Europe, the US and other places on Friday.

The airport also warned that the timetable will keep changing. Focus Taiwan quoted the airport operator: “TIAC reminded passengers to check their flight status, as departures and arrivals could be moved earlier or delayed.” That advice was for passengers. It applies just as much to anyone with an air waybill booked for this weekend.

Why the air side hurts more this year

Taiwan’s export mix is the reason we rank the air impact first.

AI servers and high-value electronics have been driving demand on Taiwan’s direct and indirect flights to the US, Dimerco reported in July (STAT Times). Space out of Taipei was already scarce well before Champi. In July, Dimerco Express Group’s vice president for global sales and marketing, Kathy Liu, said: “The clearest signal this month is out of Taiwan. AI-driven volumes have filled the TPE transit hub to capacity,” (STAT Times, 1 July 2026). TPE is the airport code for Taoyuan.

A hub that runs full has no slack. When 75 freighters go missing in one morning, their cargo cannot just move to the next flight, because the next flight is also full. The usual result is rollovers, where a shipment is bumped to a later flight, again and again, until the backlog is gone.

There is a recent comparison. Typhoon Kong-rey made landfall in Taitung, on Taiwan’s east coast, on 31 October 2024. Taiwan’s weather agency called it the biggest typhoon to hit the island since 1996 (Khaleej Times). That morning, Taoyuan had cancelled 29 cargo flights by 9:30am (Taipei Times). Champi is forecast to make landfall in Kyushu, not Taiwan, yet it had cancelled 75 cargo flights by 9am. That is more than twice as many, in about the same window.

Kong-rey also shut financial markets, and chipmaker TSMC said at the time: “We do not expect significant impact to our operations” (Khaleej Times). TSMC expected its factories to cope then. In our reading, the bottleneck was getting goods out. We expect the same pattern now: production holds up, and the export pipeline backs up.

The ocean side is already stretched

Sea freight out of Taiwan is not in good shape either.

SEKO reports intermittent weather suspensions to gate work and berthing at Keelung, Taipei Port, Taichung and Kaohsiung. It says yard utilisation at Kaohsiung’s CCKT terminal is above 90%. Yard utilisation means how full the container storage area is.

That number matters because of how ports recover. Drewry, the shipping consultancy, estimates that a terminal running at 90% utilisation needs about a week to recover from a one-day disruption, compared with two days at 75% (Sourcing Journal, 23 October). Drewry was talking about berth use, not yard space, so the comparison is not exact. But the lesson carries over: a full terminal turns one lost day into a lost week.

Across the strait, the warnings are formal. China’s Maritime Safety Administration (MSA), which controls ship traffic, has set emergency levels by province. SEKO lists Zhejiang, which includes Ningbo-Zhoushan, at Level III. Shanghai and Fujian are at Level IV. All three are enforcing strict vessel traffic controls and limits on anchorages.

SEKO expects heavy rain from the night of 23 October through 26 October across Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai. It expects temporary gate suspensions, pilotage halts and slow coastal roads. A pilotage halt means harbour pilots, who guide ships in and out, stop work, so no ship can berth or sail.

The timing is poor. Drewry’s figures, reported by Sourcing Journal, show average waiting times at Shanghai fell from 58 to 38 hours week on week before the storm, and at Ningbo from 40 to 34 hours. SEKO still puts waits at Yangshan, Shanghai’s deep-water port, at about four days for the YS1 terminal and six to seven days at the others. Ningbo waits run 1.5 to 3 days. Sea-Intelligence data cited by Sourcing Journal had Shanghai schedule reliability at 12.2% in August. That means about one ship in eight arrived on time.

Where the storm goes next

The forecast track has moved east. Japan’s Meteorological Agency, Korea’s Meteorological Administration and the US Joint Typhoon Warning Center all now expect a landfall in Kyushu, in southern Japan, according to the Seoul Economic Daily. The Korean agency expects Champi to turn extratropical by 3am on 26 October over land about 60 km north of Kagoshima. Extratropical means it loses its typhoon structure and becomes an ordinary, if strong, storm.

Jeju could see 50 to 100 mm of rain through 25 October. Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang could see 20 to 60 mm. Waves of 2 to 5 metres are forecast around Jeju on 25 October. We expect feeder services, the smaller ships that link Kyushu and Busan to the big hubs, to run late around 25 and 26 October.

The turn toward Japan does not change our call on China. MSA controls are already in force, and SEKO still expects pilotage halts in Shanghai through 26 October. Ports in China close for warnings, not only for direct hits.

What forwarders should do now

First, assume Taiwan air export capacity is gone until Tuesday 27 October. Freight that missed Friday will compete on Tuesday and Wednesday with freight that was always booked for those days.

Second, rank shipments by value and deadline before Tuesday morning. Chips and servers on tight launch dates should be first in line for the first confirmed flights. Lower-value goods can wait or move to sea freight if the dates allow.

Third, warn consignees about delays now, with a date, not a vague “delayed”. A shipper who hears “Thursday at the earliest” on Saturday plans around it. One who hears it on Wednesday does not.

Fourth, on ocean bookings out of Shanghai, Ningbo, Xiamen and Fuzhou for late October, expect rolled bookings and push carriers for revised dates early. Allow for knock-on delays on feeder legs via Kyushu and Busan.

Our predictions

These are our calls, not forecasts from any of the sources above.

Taiwan air exports held up from 23 October will not all have flown before Friday 30 October. Two lost working days, a hub already running full and cancelled long-haul belly space add up to most of next week.

On ocean, Shanghai and Ningbo-Zhoushan container terminals will suspend at least part of their operations for 12 hours or more between Friday night 23 October and Sunday 25 October. That will happen even though Champi is now forecast to turn toward Kyushu, because MSA traffic controls are already in force and SEKO still expects Shanghai pilotage halts through 26 October.

At least one major carrier will announce a skipped Shanghai or Ningbo call in the week of 26 October. And waiting times at Yangshan will not be back to normal before mid-November.

Sources