Frederic Neumann is co-head of Asian Economics Research at HSBC.

Containers are piling up in Asian ports. Shippers can't keep up with demand. Sneakers and semiconductors are in desperately short supply. The pandemic has provided a boon to the region's exporters, but this is about to end. Shipments will cool from their torrid pace and trade will slow over the coming year, posing headwinds to Asian growth.

Few would have predicted it. While COVID-19 decimated growth the world over, destroying lives and livelihoods in all corners of the globe, Asian economies were able to lean on at least one resilient pillar: soaring shipments of goods. Lockdowns spurred the demand for the consumer electronics and household items that the region excels at producing. And with the virus held mostly at bay, at least initially, Asian manufacturers never suffered the disruptions of their peers elsewhere.

It is tempting to think that the boom will endure. Shipping costs, despite a recent pullback, remain sky-high. Growth has begun to recover in key Western markets, holding out the prospect of a further strengthening in demand. Supply bottlenecks suggest trade in these goods, which only factory Asia can produce in the quantity the world requires, remains as brisk as ever.

But the headlines obscure a more challenging reality. What supported Asian exporters was an unprecedented shift in the composition of global demand. GDP may have fallen precipitously, and is only now beginning to return to its pre-pandemic level globally, but this was mainly because of a plunge in services. The bulk of world spending goes to leisure, travel, entertainment, and commerce generally -- all of which were severely curtailed by the arrival of the virus.

Instead, consumers in particular, but also businesses, shifted their purchases to the harder stuff 'needed' during the pandemic. Households who could afford it splurged on new TVs and furniture -- many rediscovered the joys of home cooking, for example, leading to a shortage of blenders, while solitary leisure pursuits pushed up the demand for bicycle parts.

In the U.S., retail sales, a proxy for household spending on goods, jumped by an annual $700 billion, or 16%, from its pre-pandemic level.

Businesses, meanwhile, stepped up their purchases, too: from networking gear and servers that facilitate work-from-home arrangements to temperature readers, face-masks, and plexiglass dividers. But in many parts of the world, though much less so in Asia, local disruptions to production as workers stayed home strained output, increasing the reliance on suppliers from the East.

As the global economy heals, however, a reversal is occurring. Demand is shifting back toward services. Households will over time curtail their demand for items that helped them through the pandemic -- a second TV or laptop is no longer needed; the kitchen is well stocked. Businesses, too, with most of their hard infrastructure in place, will once again shift their focus to bringing employees into the office and interacting directly with customers.

Consumers who splurged on new TVs and furniture during the pandemic will soon shift back toward spending on services, leading to a fall in new export orders placed with Asian manufacturers.   © Reuters

This shift in the composition of GDP will be acutely felt in Asia. Export growth, roaring for well over a year now, will begin to fizzle even as economic activity across the world continues to recover. Already, new export orders placed with manufacturers in the region have started to contract. Shipments remain strong, for now, as backlogs are worked through and the piles of containers stranded on Asian shores diminishes only gradually.

But the declining flow of new orders points to a harsher reality: after the world has stocked up on the goods that Asia produces, a lull will inevitably set in. Once the backlogs are cleared and manufacturers have caught up with their deliveries, once inventories are rebuilt and the world moves on from its trauma, Asian export growth will fizzle. The sturdy pillar will perhaps not buckle, but it will be no longer robust enough to carry the region's economies.

The good news, one might argue, is that supply chains will then finally become disentangled and critical components more readily available as capacity is freed. That should take the sting out of price pressures that now plague much of the world. From this perspective, then, the current spike in inflation remains largely a transitory affair: at least the bottlenecks that have caused the price of goods, largely produced in Asia, to surge, should ease over the coming quarters.

The challenge, however, is that this leaves Asian economies more dependent on local demand. One might suppose this shift, from external to domestic drivers of growth, is only natural. But Asia is highly reliant on exports, an essential fuel to its economies. As the trade engine begins to sputter, the drag on overall growth and employment will mount.

This is not to say that the recovery will be derailed. Asian consumers, freed from the strictures of lockdowns, and more confident that the virus has been hemmed in, will venture out like their peers in other parts of the world and lift the services sector. Local businesses, too, will be able to breathe more easily, setting their sights on a more normal course of affairs.

But the big boom in exports is set to fade.