Commentary

Few in the industry combine the breadth of experience and willingness to share their opinions in an open forum. Ron Widdows, former NOL-APL chief who now heads Hamburg-based Rickmers Group, is one of them.

If you think drayage is a tough job today, imagine doing it with horses.

Though it seems odd to hear myself called an “elder statesman,” my 42 years in transportation allow me an opinion of the industry today. Is it better or worse, or just different?

Combine several hundred longshoremen on a work break with energetic speakers using microphones they don’t need, and you get a lot of noise.

Transshipping can be fraught with costs, time and risk that need to be fully recognized, weighed and accepted before proceeding with this option.

We are an LTL carrier. Some shippers of products used in food packaging are placing restrictions on us that we are questioning.

When Ron Widdows, CEO of shipowner and lessor Rickmers Group, was asked at the TPM conference, “Is there any hope for this industry?” he replied: “Unless the people who are running the companies get to the point where they can price the product at a level where they can make money, then we will stay at the same rate levels for years.”

Port congestion that spills out into the real world in the form of truck lines, pollution, supply chain delays and occasional violence is a rapidly escalating problem affecting foreign trade.

There were no real losers among U.S. South Atlantic and Gulf ports that have ambitious expansion plans under the Obama budget released last week.

As a general rule, “shipper” and “consignor” refer to one and the same person/entity, in law and general usage. Still, there is a difference, and one that occasionally becomes important.

Call it the “mega” age. The 13,000-TEU-plus vessels that have spawned the formation and expansion of alliances such as the P3, G6 and, most recently, Evergreen’s joining the CKYH are the latest examples of a container shipping industry taking dramatic measures to control its fate.

I’ve been reading various articles on Southern California’s operating problems related to chassis, terminal conditions, truckers and an unfortunate internal report of a container sitting at a terminal in Long Beach for 10 days after being discharged from the vessel awaiting a trucker to take it to the railyard for movement by train to Chicago.

If there’s a theme to this year’s TPM Conference, it’s that 2014 is the year of the game-changer in international logistics. The changes the industry is grappling with as we congregate in Long Beach this week are profound and will define the main challenges confronting shippers, carriers, third-party logistics providers and others possibly for years.

Q. A carrier has these rules. They do not recognize Section 7 on any bill of lading as stated in the rules tariff.

It would be a convenient story line to link one of the major reasons for this winter’s gridlock at the ports of New York-New Jersey and Los Angeles-Long Beach to deficiencies in infrastructure. But the topic that yielded seaports a rare mention in last month’s State of the Union address is just one factor in the winter of discontent that users of the three largest U.S. ports are currently enduring. Of much more immediate impact is the anarchy surrounding chassis, and the root cause of that is to be found not on land but at sea.

Every broker should continuously evaluate the value proposition they project onto the market.

This month the world has watched as Olympic skaters have spun and jumped, skiers have swooshed downhill and Russia has delivered undrinkable water and unusable, unsanitary toilets to visitors in Sochi.

NEW DELHI, India—A yellow truck festooned with black tassels and hex symbols to ward off bad luck passed our van on the right as we jounced over the potholes that slowed us to a crawl on the road between Jaipur and Jodhpur. The truck was similar to many of the trucks I saw on a three-week road trip in the northern Indian states of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh this winter, except for one thing: It was carrying a 20-foot container, the only box I spotted in hundreds of miles of tortuous driving. The blue box bore the familiar APL logo.

As the 2014 U.S. election season begins to take shape, the possibility of immigration reform is growing. How would reform impact the clearance of imports and exports at the U.S. border?

From my perspective the JOC article titled “NY-NJ Port Mess ‘Worst Ever’” does a significant disservice to a number of the participants within the harbor that are attempting to address a very difficult situation, which in large measure was brought on by events beyond their control.

While disputes between trucking companies and marine terminal operators over turn times may be nothing new, the excuses for inefficiency have gotten old. While we have argued and pointed fingers, cargo volumes have increased, congestion and gridlock has continued and the outside world looks on, wondering when this industry is going to get its act together. We would suggest, it’s time to try something new. Instead of excuses and finger-pointing, let’s try cooperation.

Amid the deluge of year-end statistics highlighting the yawning economic gap between the European Union’s more solid northern member states and its debt-stricken southern half there’s one that looks, at first glance, like a mistake — container traffic.

Forget the economy, there’s a new threat to growth in global trade and to the manufacturers that produce it, the retailers that import it and the carriers that move it.

Transportation of marijuana may remain illegal under federal law, even between states where it has been legalized, but is it legal to transport it in intrastate commerce within those states?

What prompted a headline 20 percent drop in the U.S. to China trade last year?

Interesting developments already are emerging just a month into the new year. Drewry started 2014 quickly by reporting that fewer than half of the global container carriers made money in 2013.

Does a mismatched seal number on a trailer give a shipper the right to hold a carrier responsible for damages?

For a fortunate number of you, 2014 will be the year you finally get that Global Trade Management system you’ve been pleading for. If so, you’ll quickly find that preparing for the implementation isn’t for the faint of heart.

The latest earnings from UPS reveal two trends that might at first seem contradictory: e-commerce is growing in leaps and bounds globally, and customers are choosing to defer delivery on packages to get greater savings.

President Obama is right to recognize the need for new trade promotion authority and other resources to promote more exports. But he and Congress should not overlook some simple steps that would also help to remove obstacles that currently keep America’s Foreign-Trade Zones — a shining exception to the sluggishness of the overall export economy — from doing even better.

When analyzing the P3 Network, one should look closely at what the world’s three largest carriers have put together and not at Maersk Line, Mediterranean Shipping and CMA CGM in totality.

You may not have watched the 2014 State of the Union address by President Obama and, if you did, you may have missed his announcement that he would be introducing new fuel efficiency standards for trucks in the coming months. (It came around 35 minutes in.) The announcement was indicative of the significant changes that should be, can be and already are being made to the fuel efficiency, and hence emissions levels, of freight trucks in the U.S.

Despite the economic uncertainty the U.S. has experienced since 2008, domestic intermodal traffic in North America is growing robustly. Overall year-over-year volume growth through August 2013 was a healthy 6.8 percent. Domestic containers continue to see conversion from trailers in rail service — growing 9.7 percent, while trailer volumes shrank 2.9 percent, according to the Intermodal Association of North America, Yusen Logistics estimates and TTX fleet size data.

Like death and taxes, it seems certain that wrangling between trucking companies and marine terminals over truck turn times will always be with us.

The ‘giant sucking sound’ of jobs moving south that Ross Perot so famously forecast would be NAFTA’s calling card isn’t the case at all 20 years after the agreement was enacted.

Growth in U.S. containerized imports will accelerate this year thanks to an improving labor and auto market, a resilient manufacturing sector and expected gains in the value of the U.S. dollar as the Federal Reserve begins to taper its massive quantitative monetary stimulus. This acceleration hinges upon the major assumption that another debt-ceiling crisis will be avoided.

Third-party logistics had a better year than President Obama in 2013, but that’s not saying much. Gross revenue topped $150 billion for the first time. All market segments showed growth, with domestic transportation management leading the way. Overall net revenue growth was 4.9 percent.

As the 2014 TPM Conference approaches, the rumblings of change in the container shipping world are growing louder. It shouldn’t be surprising. How long can an industry that has averaged a 1.7 percent profit margin over the past 15 years, according to Seabury, not be ready to break out into a new business model? But people have been saying that for years. The difference is that now things may actually be starting to happen.