This Week

 The spot rate for shipping a 40-foot container from Hong to Los Angeles jumped 10 percent in the week ending Jan. 11 from a week earlier, according to price data provided to Drewry Shipping Consultants by non-vessel-operating common carriers in Hong Kong. The spot rate in the latest week is $1,416 per FEU, up from $1,284 in the week ending Jan. 4. “It’s the direct result of the Transpacific Stabilization Agreement’s plan to raise freight rates on Jan. 15,” said Philip Damas, managing director of Drewry Supply Chain Advisors in London. “We have seen quite a solid discipline by the carriers to push for their emergency rate increase.” Earlier this month the TSA called for a mid-contract emergency rate increase of $400 per 40-foot container shipped from Asia to U.S. West Coast ports to tide its carrier members over until they can seek an $800-per-FEU increase in that trade lane in their 2010-2011 contracts, which they will negotiate this spring. Damas expects to see another large increase in rates next week. Carriers are implementing the emergency rate increases over these two weeks, he said. The trans-Pacific spot rate increases are part of a strong recovery in freight rates worldwide that Drewry is seeing this year. “We are in a completely different pricing environment now,” Damas said.

Report: Oil Speculation Cost CMA CGM $1 Billion

CMA CGM was awash in red ink even before the recession sent cargo volume — and carriers — spiraling downward in late 2008, according to a French newspaper report. The world’s third-largest container ship by capacity lost nearly $1 billion in ill-timed derivatives investments in 2008, largely on oil trading. This left the Marseilles-based carrier without financial breathing room as it coped with $5.6 billion in debt just as an unprecedented slump in container shipping demand hit, according to the Liberation newspaper. The report came just days before a new board, elected at an extraordinary meeting of shareholders last month, prepared to meet this week to elect new leadership for a family run business founded more than 30 years ago by Jacques Saade. Saade has ceded control of CMA CGM’s day-to-day management as part of an agreement with lenders to provide a $500 million credit line this month. The carrier, which lost $515 million on $4.8 billion in revenue in the first half of 2009, said it expects a profit this year.

LTL Rates Expected to Firm by Midyear