Container lines

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.

After focusing on understanding the systems of carriers and ensuring that NYSHEX fits into their systems, the focus is shifting toward making its platform more attractive to shippers, specifically retailers.

Access to container status information remains affected in the wake of the CMA CGM cyber attack, with a visibility provider saying containers booked by the carrier can only be tracked if the bookings occurred before the disruption.

Maersk and MSC do not believe demand on the trans-Atlantic through the fourth quarter will be strong enough to support four Europe–North America loops.

If Zim Integrated Shipping Services pursues an initial public offering, it would be the carrier’s fourth attempt since 2008. Weak financial performance and challenging industry conditions scuppered past attempts.

Forwarders, shippers and software providers connected to CMA CGM’s systems continued on Tuesday to sort through the effects of a malware attack on the Marseille-based container line.

Network outages have become a highly sensitive topic for the container shipping supply chain since the crippling notPetya cyber attack on Maersk in June 2017.

Having exhausted the space allotments in their annual contracts, retailers and other importers are signing short-term contracts to secure capacity at Asian load ports. This is pushing short-term contract rates higher.

With economists believing the sharp economic recovery seen in the US during the third quarter is already sputtering, questions are growing about how long the import surge will last.

A long-awaited recovery in the trans-Atlantic trade appears to be underway with a steep increase in US import volume from Europe for some previously hard-hit commodities.

According to Drewry's container freight rate index, some spot pricing from China to the US West Coast surpassed $4,000 per FEU this week, a psychological barrier that appeared to be insurmountable just last week due to admonitions from regulators in China and the US about aggressive carrier pricing.

Similar to the current market in the trans-Pacific trade, container freight rates from Asia to the East Coast of South America have been buoyed by surging consumer demand and a rush of exports leaving China ahead of Golden Week.

With cargo volumes and spot rates out of Asia surging as the United States and other countries begin to climb out of the COVID‑19 recession, US importers are increasingly turning to non-vessel-operating common carriers (NVOs) to secure capacity.

Amidst confusion involving blank sailings, extra-loaders, and announcements this past week by government regulatory agencies in Beijing and Washington, spot rates in the eastbound trans-Pacific continued to climb higher.

Shippers using third-party vendors to help them manage auditing and paying their freight bills see a sizable advantage in process costs versus those that manage the function in-house, new research has found.

The US FMC said it is closely monitoring capacity and pricing conditions in the eastbound trans-Pacific, but is not yet ready to launch a fact-finding investigation or petition for legal action.

For so-called old China hands, the Ministry of Transportation and Communication’s Sept. 11 summoning of carriers in Shanghai to instruct them to add capacity hardly comes as a surprise.

The suspension and weakening of general rate increases comes after Chinese regulators on Friday encouraged major container lines to add capacity and be less aggressive in raising their rates as US imports from Asia continue to rise.

Predicting actual demand in individual weeks in the container shipping markets is notoriously difficult with any significant degree of accuracy, though not for lack of trying.

In what is still very much an evolving scenario, carriers are digesting what they were told by the Chinese government and how it will impact their businesses going forward.

Ocean Network Express (ONE) has signed up with India’s port community system to digitize its last-mile delivery offerings via application program interfaces (APIs), touted as a first collaborative step by any carrier operating out of the country.

Two Australia-based software providers, Mizzen and Maxamation, have developed a product that will enable container lines to strategize around profitability of dynamically quoted ocean spot pricing.

In just one month’s time, retailers have gone from a pessimistic peak-season outlook to a forecast of better-than-expected imports this fall.

US import growth from Asia and China accelerated in August after a strong July, driven by e-commerce merchandise and PPE supplies.

A steady stream of extra-loader vessels in the trans-Pacific have failed to blunt the steady increase in spot rates.