Container Shipping News

A coalition of stakeholders says they will consider calling for an update of the Shipping Act of 1984 next year after asking the FMC for more immediate relief on detention and demurrage charges in the US’s two largest port complexes.

Many trans-Pacific shippers still have contract rates far below current spot rates, and while they cannot necessarily ship all their cargo on those low rates and at the same time get the space and equipment they need, they still do benefit.

Benefitting from equipment shortages in Asia and tight vessel capacity, NVOs continue to gain market share, but it’s the mid-size NVOs who are gaining at the fastest pace.

The sustained demand for Asian exports is worsening an equipment imbalance that has built steadily through the peak season on the trans-Pacific and Asia-Europe trades.

Moody’s Investors Service’s upgrade of the container shipping industry comes after Drewy last month upgraded its own 2020 profit expectation for the industry by 16 percent to $11 billion.

If creditors reject the restructuring and PIL is liquidated, it could be the biggest container line failure since the collapse of South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping in 2016, although its impact is likely to be significantly less.

US imports from Asia increased more than 10 percent in October, with forwarders forecasting only a modest slowdown in growth through January

Cyber attacks on companies in the global logistics industry are an ever-present threat, but container lines and software providers say hosting systems in the cloud helps combat the threat and aid in recovery.

Retailers say the record peak season of 2020 will be followed by lower year-over-year import growth in the next few months, with the strength of the US economic recovery next year dependent on progress controlling coronavirus disease 2019.

Cloud computing is ubiquitous in the world of commerce, and that’s spread in recent years to container lines, which are using a migration to platforms like Microsoft Azure to develop products quickly and then scale them back without committing resources to a server infrastructure.

Evergreen Line’s ad-hoc service, which connects Asia with the US East Coast via the Suez Canal, is helping e-commerce shippers in the greater Baltimore area meet demand, said William P. Doyle, executive director at Maryland Port Administration.

Trans-Pacific carriers, including those offering premium services, have been unable to fulfill all of their bookings in recent weeks due to the container shortage in Asia.

Matson says e-commerce demand for expedited Asian service will remain high even when the impact of the pandemic COVID-19 recedes.

US agricultural exporters fear that even if they pay higher shipping rates, carriers will still turn down their bookings because liners can generate much higher revenue by using the containers for US imports from Asia.

Twill started as Maersk’s play in the neutral digital forwarding space, but it has shifted its focus to funnel small shipper volumes into Maersk’s logistics and vessel operations network.

Equipment shortages coincide with a recovery in regional economies and the shift of production to other regional countries due to the China-US trade spat.

Maersk’s integrator strategy is not affecting the carrier’s forwarder customers in a universal way, since the various elements of the transformation impact different sized intermediaries in varying ways.

The busiest US Gulf Coast ports saw only a small decline in throughput during the first seven months of the year despite the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumer demand in the US and abroad.

The disruption and unpredictability caused by the pandemic earned trans-Pacific carriers some early 2020 patience from their customers, but that goodwill is fading as service and price diverge sharply as contract talks near.

Although economic forecasts point to a possible weakening in consumer demand, carriers are expected to continue the capacity management discipline they have displayed all year to prevent rate destruction in the trans-Pacific trades

Alternatives to expensive air freight have been available on the trans-Pacific for years, but as space constraints make air cargo an increasingly unreliable option, a new expedited ocean product will soon be launched on the trans-Atlantic.

US exporters are crying foul as at least one trans-Pacific carriers has begun turning down shipments of low-revenue agricultural exports in order to expedite the return of empty containers to Asian load ports to carry much higher-paying US imports of consumer merchandise.

TradeLens will use the integration specialist Youredi to offer data providers and consumers on its platform the option to connect their systems to the container visibility and documentation product co-developed by Maersk and IBM.

System integration provider Youredi is trying to attract logistics and maritime companies to help it build a new template-based integration platform for data and partner connectivity.

A new set of data definitions for terminals and container lines to coordinate port calls was released Tuesday by the Digital Container Shipping Association, the non-profit group’s latest attempt to drive standardization in the maritime industry.

Shippers contend with a lack of transparency when it comes to container lines communicating changes for the earliest return date for their boxes, creating operational headaches for cargo owners already affected by tariffs and COVID-19, new research has found.

Despite all the noise around the current lofty spot rate market, more subtle, but important, changes are sneaking into the market that provide guidance on where things may be headed in coming years, with premium services a good place to start.

Container allocation capability among cargo owners is improving, but digital procurement is still not all that common, logistics technology veteran Martin Hubert told JOC Uncharted this week.

On the same day Hapag-Lloyd upped its financial outlook, Moody’s Investors Service raised the carrier’s credit rating by one notch, with a stable outlook.

TradeLens said Thursday that Maersk’s liner competitors MSC and CMA CGM are both “fully integrated” into the platform, which could make it more appealing for cargo owners and 3PLs to use the blockchain-based solution.

Services featuring expedited transit times and premium cargo handling continue to gain popularity in the booming trade between China and Los Angeles-Long Beach.

A huge volume of imports from China that was concentrated mostly in Los Angeles and Long Beach produced a banner month for the Southern California port complex in September.

Carriers are seeking equipment surcharges or premium service charges as Indian shippers scramble to secure outbound vessel space in a market that is seeing more exports than imports.

This year’s peak season promises to be tumultuous, but 2021 could be just as difficult for shippers as 2020.

Interest among carriers in smart containers and improved cargo visibility has grown in recent years, and now the pace is quickening as carriers show more willingness to listen to customer demands for improved service and visibility.

US retailers are stepping up their purchase orders and import projections for the rest of the year in order to avoid a repeat of the stock outages that occurred this summer.

Although the growth in US imports decelerated slightly in September from August, the double-digit, year-over-year monthly increase indicates there is still strong momentum for the coming months.

While carriers are deploying extra-loaders and reinstating blank sailings, space in the eastbound trans-Pacific is still lagging demand and equipment in Asia is tight, so US importers are paying premium rates to guarantee priority services.

Giving better volume forecasts to container lines and collaborating with truckload carriers can help shippers when capacity gets tight, but it’s higher rates that lock in the slot space on a vessel or guarantees a trailer load gets picked up when needed.

If container shipping rode the wave of China’s emergence, set in motion by the global consensus around trade represented by the creation of the WTO in 1995, the industry must now confront a potentially very different geopolitical future taking shape with almost daily developments chronicling a deterioration in US-China relations.