Chinese New Year 2027 falls on 6 February 2027, marking the start of the Year of the Horse. As with every year, factory production and export activity concentrate heavily in the weeks before the holiday, as suppliers race to complete and ship orders before shutting down, typically for one to two weeks depending on the factory and region, sometimes longer in some manufacturing hubs.
Working backward from the holiday date is the most reliable planning method: production needs to complete and cargo needs to be ready for pickup roughly two to four weeks before CNY to have a realistic chance at space on a pre-holiday sailing, given that booking demand concentrates sharply in that same window across every shipper sourcing from China.
The period immediately after CNY carries its own, different risk — factories do not resume full production capacity immediately after reopening, since workers returning from the holiday, sometimes from distant home provinces, do not all arrive back on the same day, which means orders placed to ship immediately after CNY often see longer-than-normal production lead times for several weeks into the new year.
For any order intended to ship in the December 2026 through February 2027 window, starting the production and booking conversation now, rather than waiting until closer to the holiday, is the single most effective way to avoid both the pre-holiday capacity crunch and the post-holiday production slowdown.