Cyberattack leaves $1m of frozen lamb trapped at docks

“The strikes are causing us more grief than this cyberattack,” he said.

Further delays expected

The cyberattack left 30,000 containers of consumer goods stranded at its terminals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Freemantle on Sunday.

The Dubai-controlled stevedore, which handles 40 per cent of the country’s international freight, reopened the gates to its east coast landside operations early on Monday morning, and said it expected to move 5000 containers out of the four affected terminals over the course of the day.

But it also warned of further delays in coming days as it worked through a backlog of delayed shipments – and companies are concerned about the knock-on effects for future orders.

The owner of a separate NSW-based premium foods exporter, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Australian Financial Review he had more than 10 containers either stuck at the affected ports or scheduled to leave from them within days.

‘Not a good thing to wake up to’

He said each container had between $100,000 and $150,000 worth of goods in it.

“It’s not a good thing to wake up to on a Sunday morning,” the owner said, referring to when he heard about the cyberattack.

He told the Financial Review that people in the agricultural industry were “pretty resilient” as they had plenty of experience dealing with disease outbreaks, foreign currency fluctuations and global financial crises.

But he said this latest setback was difficult to take, as it came just weeks after Qantas Freight suffered an IT system outage that affected roughly 25 per cent of the nation’s inbound airfreight, and reportedly cost its customers hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Daniel Horwitz, operations manager at Australian meat exporter Remesis Group, which was unaffected by the cybersecurity attack on DP World, said such incidents could have significant effects on exporters given containers of wagyu beef “can be worth close to a million dollars”.

“So it’s crucial for exporters to have their ducks in a row, but unfortunately it’s out of your control sometimes,” Mr Horwitz said.

Christmas shopping unlikely to be affected

On Sunday, retailers and supermarkets were keen to stress they had already received most of their Christmas stock.

A Woolworths spokeswoman said the supermarket chain was monitoring the situation but didn’t “anticipate any immediate impacts at this time”. The Financial Review understands rival chain Coles also expects no immediate impacts.

Meanwhile, Paul Zahra, chief executive of the Australian Retailers Association, said on Sunday that most retailers had already received their Christmas imports.

“But retail is a 52-week a year operation and so any significant disruption to port operations is potentially harmful.”