Page 18 - Freight Waves News Today

“Our largest export commodity continues to be air” is a frequent saying of Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles. That’s certainly true at his port, where exports are containerized. Far more empty boxes leave than full ones, so they can be reloaded quickly in Asia. But look at the big picture ...

Yet another sign of stress for energy supplies and global supply chains: Spot rates for large dry cargo ships just topped $80,000 per day for the first time since 2009, and freight derivatives for the fourth quarter — a period when rates for these vessels normally pull back — just spiked. Not long ago, it ...

It’s a seemingly basic shipping formula: Liners operate a fleet of container vessels, whether owned or chartered, with total capacity measured in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs). The more TEUs of cargo that liners can load per TEU of fleet capacity, the higher their revenues. Here’s where it gets more complicated: Freight income per TEU is ...

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

Talk about the future of ocean shipping and it always comes back to the cycle. When is this horrific tanker down-cycle going to end? Did investors buy the tanker stocks too early? How high can this crazy container-shipping up-cycle actually go? When will containerized cargo shippers ever get relief? Is this finally the start of ...

In a sign of just how frenzied the container market has become, a freight forwarder is reportedly paying $135,000 per day for a short-term charter of the S Santiago, a 15-year-old container ship with a capacity of 5,060 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs). “Charter rates for short employment … have gone out of control,” said Alphaliner ...

How Three Chinese Companies Cornered Global Container Production Never before has the humble ocean shipping container been this important to American business. If you can’t get one, you can’t move your international cargo — and supply has never been tighter. The cost of global trade is now contingent on how many containers exist, where they are and where they aren’t. How many containers exist is controlled by China. Virtually every ocean shipping container in the world is built there. J...

California’s massive container-ship traffic jam is still really jammed Peak shipping season is coming soon — and the “parking lot” of container ships stuck at anchor off the coast of California is still there, with Oakland surpassing Los Angeles/Long Beach as the epicenter of congestion. Shipping giant Maersk warned in a customer advisory on Wednesday that Los Angeles and Long Beach “remain strained with vessel wait times averaging between one to two weeks.” But it said “the situa...

by Tyler Durden By Greg Miller of Freight Waves, Spot ocean container rates are up triple digits year on year, ergo they must be near their peak. They’re so high they don’t have much more room to run. So goes a common belief in the container market, despite the fact that this premise has already been proven wrong, and that container rates could theoretically have a lot more room to run if the upper limit is defined the same way it is in non-containerized shipping. One leading freight-forwar...

The headlines last August and September blared: “Trans-Pacific rates are going crazy.” “Rates are on fire.” “Records shattered.” Oh, what cargo shippers would give to pay the rates they paid eight or nine months ago. Those earlier records were repeatedly shattered. It just happened yet again. “Non-stop demand of ocean freight and the resulting delays ...