(Yicai Global) May 27 -- China’s rail and road cargo transport are both back to 90 percent of normal levels as supply chains are restored and demand for logistics bounces back as the waves of Covid-19 across the country recede.

Ordinary road haulage surged 12.6 percent on May 24 from April 18, freight traffic on expressways soared 10.9 percent and rail cargo jumped 9.2 percent, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Transport.

Road haulage should continue to pick up as the Covid-19 outbreaks in Beijing and Shanghai wane and supply chains should recovery more quickly next month, said Lu Zhe, an analyst at Topsperity Securities.

Upstream industries in the steel sector are basically back to normal and blast furnaces and coking plants in eastern China are where they were before the Covid-19 outbreak, Lu said. The midstream tire and chemical industries are about three weeks behind.

China’s main ports are all operating smoothly with stable production indicators, Liu Pengfei, spokesperson for the Ministry of Transport, said on May 26. From May 1 to May 24, China’s key ports had a cargo throughput of 790 million tons, a gain of 4.2 percent from the same period last month.

The average daily throughput at the Port of Shanghai edged up 4.6 percent from a month ago to 107,500 twenty-foot equivalent units, around 84 percent of last year’s levels, and is continuing to improve, he said.

A resurgence of Covid-19 in the country greatly affected cross-provincial transport routes, hampering logistics and strangling supply chains. In the first four months, revenue in the logistics industry as a whole slumped 5.1 percent year on year, of which earnings at express delivery, railway and warehousing service companies slumped 10 percent, the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing and the China Logistics Information Center said on May 25.

In the past week, mail handling at state-backed courier China Postal Express and Logistics has recovered to where it was before the outbreaks.

Editor: Kim Taylor