South Carolina ports were on record pace before pandemic

The South Carolina Ports Authority (SCPA) was on track for a record fiscal year — until the coronavirus spread across the globe.

SCPA President and CEO Jim Newsome said during a livestreamed interview staged by SC Biz News on Thursday that the COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a blow to container volumes during the fiscal year, which runs from July 1 to June 30.

“If you look through February of our fiscal year, which was eight months, we were 25,000 containers ahead of our plan, a record pace,” Newsome said. “We were headed easily to $100 million cash flow. And then China really never came back from Chinese New Year for six weeks and then the Western world shut down due to the pandemic.