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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. Just three Chinese companies account for the majority of production, with Chinese factories now build...
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 situation is even more dire at the Port of Oakland, where wait times now extend up to three weeks.” Wes...
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-forwarder executive told American Shipper in August 2020 after the initial spike, “I do not think there ...
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 ...