News digest. 13 Jan
The big players aim to kill two birds with one stone: to facilitate their growth and paint the world green.
No matter how big and ambitious collaborative initiatives in terms of sustainability may be, the big giants will never miss the opportunity to facilitate even more ambitious goals and set the tone for the entire sector. Maersk believes that it will be able to achieve net-zero emissions 10 years early, by 2040. The breakthrough can be possible thanks to its close ties with the aviation sector. This is one of the reasons (or excuses?) why the company has been considering the acquisitions of airfreight assets since the earning has been enormous. The company will also reconsider its supplier relations in order to address emissions from inland transport services and vessel building.
While the US government is still only threatening to impose additional charges to speed up container movement, such companies as Zim chose carrots instead of sticks as an incentive. The program implies that the ocean carrier is offering to pay truckers up to $200 for each dry-van or laden container picked up within four days after it is discharged from the ship. The logistics costs remain at cosmic levels, so importers are forced to look for alternative ways and start using containerships as offshore warehouses. However, not everything is necessarily in the dark hues. Thanks to congestion at the east and west ports, the interest rates are lower than ever, so the companies can finance a surplus amount of inventory and essentially store it at sea for two months. In addition, California’s ports will receive $2.3 billion of investment in the coming couple of years that will be spent on a range of initiatives from the improvement of the infrastructure to the development of the zero-emissions policies. The former is especially important as to what extent the ports are improved will determine how successfully they will be able to handle growing volumes. The unprecedented demand will remain a global issue, therefore, European facilities are trying to anticipate the splurge in demand as well, especially when it comes to premium warehousing space. To address the challenge, DP World is going to speed up the delivery of a speculative green warehouse at London Gateway’s port-centric Logistics Park. In Asia, Thailand aims to boost the inland container ports to serve as trucking links to neighboring countries. Experts point out that among other factors that will define 2022 is also a more than 60% increase of freight rates on the major routes. The data is derived from the current state of affairs. This will have consequences for the shippers’ contract. Even if they manage to sign at a relevantly low price, the value of such agreements will be minimal if the carriers can drop them without serious penalty. Shippers will also have to deal with more delays that by now have become the mundane reality due to the omicron sparks worldwide. For a while, Chinese ports have been facing partial lockdowns but as new ports have to go through it, the more disruptions they bring. This time it is the Port of Tianjin, one of the busiest ports in the world, that is seeing a drastic increase of cases. The dynamic is extremely alarming because as 2021 proved, it is the Chinese ports that influenced the state of the majority of international facilities. In the meantime, the challenges are topped with unpredictable incidents such as container collapse. Madrid Bridge has lost around 30 boxes, which will surely add up to the delays while the company is recovering this issue in respect of any cargo lost overboard. The vessel has to make its way to New York to investigate the damage. Container collapse is a common phenomenon for the winter season, and now companies are perplexed with the question of how to make transportation more secure.
For the rail sector, the New Silk Road has, to some extent, become the beacon of development and this week it has seen another update regarding the Xi’an-Valenton link that is now regular. Without a doubt, the improvement will alleviate the difficulties faced by the ocean freight due to the COVID restrictions. However, the famous route has a rising competitor. North Sea-Baltic Rail Freight Corridor is extensively growing – the addition of three connections has expanded it to Poland, the Netherlands, and Belgium. North-Sea ports are crucial rail freight players that will add value and provide new business opportunities, as well as facilitate a further modal shift to rail. Poland continues to strengthen its presence. On the already mentioned the New Silk Road, it is going to build a new multimodal terminalin Karsznice. The target capacity of the depot storage area is 4,500 TEUs, with a capacity of 220,000 TEU per year. All these initiatives demonstrate that the growing demand will not be solely a shipping sector’s problem. Indian railways will also face this issue, according to the updated forecast. Maersk has witnessed a 43% growth in the movement of containerized goods on rail and a 23% growth in rail for import and export combined in the region. The splurge creates more uncertainty in the already disrupted logistics ecosystem.
The political situation in Kazakhstan did not omit the services related to crucial inland logistics ties. Although passenger and cargo flights have resumed, some companies had to arrange charter flights to deliver urgent cargo, which was complicated to do due to the sudden loss of communication.
