After the government barred corporations from publishing real-time data, a wave of COVID-19 lockdowns in Shanghai provides the largest challenge yet for investors, trading companies, and logistics managers seeking to track China's economy.

        Companies can no longer monitor how commodities are going in and out of the crucial port as a result of a recent data rule that pushed down on data sharing, as China's most populous metropolis tries to recover from weeks of debilitating coronavirus bans.

        Previously, industrial barometers ranging from crude oil stockpiles at import terminals to high-frequency container traffic at ports were readily available, providing a real-time insight into the world's second-largest economy without the delays and potential distortions of official economic statistics.

        However, following the implementation of China's Personal Information Protection Law in November, vital sources of information about the world's largest exporting nation have gone silent. To track port delays, shipping companies and brokers have turned to less reliable satellite-based tracking. There is no longer any traffic data available to measure truck transportation and trade. Traders keep track on port activity by making phone calls or even counting ships by hand.

        As work gradually resumes, the flow of commodities increases up, and shippers strive to alleviate traffic jams off China's east coast, the lack of visibility will influence every other link in China's global supply networks. 

        "We can no longer get some of the high-frequency data, such as daily cargo turnover at ports, railway and air traffic passenger statistics," said Dong Chen, Pictet Wealth Management's Asia macroeconomic research head. "Some of the data was only available on a monthly basis," Chen explained. "All we have to do now is cope with it."

        China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Transportation did not reply to requests for comment on the data law's implications.


IN THE DARK

        The data rule is the latest in "one of the most severe regulatory regimes many multinationals will face," according to accountancy firm PwC. The policies impose restrictions on how local and international organizations acquire and utilize data, and they affect every firm doing business in China.

        Before they may publish data to customers, organizations monitoring industrial or commercial activity in China must follow tight restrictions on data categorization, storage, cross-border transfers, transparency, and user permission management.

        As a result, several data providers have halted or discontinued data publication, or have relocated data behind pay walls. "Everyone is writing and talking about the port bottleneck in China owing to the latest wave of COVID," a Beijing-based oil trader said, "but we can't find much accurate data to analyze the true issue."

        When COVID first spread over China at the outset of the epidemic two years ago, analysts, investors, and journalists looked to traffic data from TomTom, a Dutch mapping company, to assess how lockdowns restricted movement across the world's most populous country. Not right now. The company's free international traffic congestion page, which continues to collect data for dozens of other sites across the world, does not include Chinese cities.

        "As Chinese regulation on the sharing and exposing of GPS data has recently been tightened, we have made the business choice to cease the historical and current traffic feed for Chinese cities through our TomTom Move Portal and Traffic Index website," TomTom spokesperson Ivo Bokkerink stated by email. According to him, TomTom continues to deliver data to Chinese subscribers.

        Traders and others who watch ship movements have relied on satellite-based location data, which is less reliable than ship-to-shore AIS signals, since shipping firms ceased broadcasting Automatic Identification System (AIS) feeds on ships in Chinese seas. "Last year, we were talking to folks a couple times each month," said Ivan Lam, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, to complement data on supply chain trends. "However, in the last several weeks, it's been on a daily basis."

        Others have taken a more traditional approach. "Real-time data-driven decision making is at the core of what we do for a job these days," said Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management. "Especially with supply chain difficulties fuelling inflation flames," he said.

        "Now we have to rely on people manually counting ships outside of Shanghai and Ningbo Ports for reference locations at 7 p.m. every day."