Nearly five years after the onset of Covid, shippers of ocean containerized freight have become all too used to the worst of all worlds—poor reliability combined with periods of historically high rates. It is of little consolation that external shocks such as the public health crisis of COVID and the geopolitical tensions in the Middle East are at least partly responsible for the challenging and costly supply chain environment shippers are experiencing seemingly on a never-ending basis.
Worse is a growing perception that ocean carriers, some of whom prided themselves in years past on schedule integrity, now see disruption irrespective of the source as a factor acting decisively in their favor. After all, when ships ran on time and ports were fluid, carriers rarely made money. But when ports backed up and ships by the dozens waited off shore, the capacity effectively removed from the market contributed to an upward spiraling of rates and previously unimaginable carrier profits.
A parade of mega-ship vessel deliveries and the likihood that the spring-summer early peak season of 2024 will fade as 2024 winds down will give shippers some respite from the tight market. But there is no guarantee that a culture of schedule integrity will return to ocean carrier operations, the one possible exception being the Gemini network to be rolled out by Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd in early 2025.
The Gemini hub and spoke network, which aims to avoid delays at a single port delaying all subsequent arrivals on a multi-port string, is intended to present to the shipping public an alternative to the prevailing reality of blanked sailings and skipped port calls. In other words, actions implemented by carriers acting in their own interests which, in the zero-sum game of container shipping, means to the disadvantage of their customers.
Further complicating the environment for shippers, as the market witnessed in the spring of 2024, conditions in container shipping can and will change on a dime. The market pivoted this spring with little warning, from one of overcapacity where carriers forecast a down year despite the Red Sea diversions, and BCOs signed annual contracts at normalized rates as low as $1500 per FEU, to a suddenly red hot market where transpacific spot rates peaked at nearly $8000 in early July and Asia-Europe rates exceeded $8,000 per FEU around the same time, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. Thus it is largely folly in the fall of 2024 to predict what the market will look like when TPM25 convenes on March 2-5, 2025.
And yet, it’s still possible to identify big-picture themes that will still very much be playing out when the 25th annual TPM convenes on March 2-5, 2025.
- Is service consistency worth even wishing for at this point? A high priority of many shippers is reducing cost, as shown by a recent Alcott Global survey, partly driven by a need to reduce inventory costs that have been propped up by higher interest rates. Any dialing back of “just-in-case” buffer, however, requires service consistency, and that is sorely lacking: As of early July, carrier on-time performance was a sobering 52%, according to Sea-Intelligence. With the Red Sea crisis continuing with no end in sight, and with carriers seeing disruption as an advantage, it is unclear what the future of service consistency is unless Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd can decisively deliver on their promise of 90%+ reliability.
- Tariffs’ potential to wreak havoc on trade flows. Newly imposed tariffs and campaign rhetoric only reinforce further how globalization is a bygone era. Biden administration tariffs announced in May on Chinese solar cells, semiconductors, lithium-ion batteries, and electric vehicles could be expanded and/or intensified by a second Trump administration, whose tariffs on $350 billion in Chinese imports Biden left untouched. Candidate Trump has threatened 60% tariffs on all China imports. By TPM25 it will be much more clear what the general direction of US trade policy will be.
- Is overcapacity inevitable? More than 200 container ships totaling 1.5 million TEU in capacity are still scheduled to be delivered in 2024 as of early May, according to S&P Global. Given that, many industry analysts believe overcapacity will return with a vengeance as soon as the spring 2024 volume runs its course. But some dispute this, believing the Red Sea diversions could endure for a while, many strings still require additional ships, and vessel speeds around the Cape of Good Hope are still faster than carriers would like. In addition, new International Maritime Organization rules to curb greenhouse gases will begin to bite in 2025, leaving increasing numbers of older ships uneconomic.
- Did ocean carrier DNA change as a result of the pandemic? The market determines shippers’ and carriers’ leverage, and as of early fall 2024 the market remained tight and carriers held the advantage. But irrespective of the ebbs and flows of the market, is there evidence of a new mindset embedded in carriers’ behavior in 2024, where NVOs are being squeezed on named accounts and additional surcharges are being applied liberally? Many believe carriers are behaving in an atypically aggressive manner and that may be here to stay. Tough lessons learned during the pandemic are being applied. Carriers are not passing up opportunities as they may have in the past, and shippers and forwarders are feeling the impact.
- Supply chain disruption used to be the exception. Now it’s routine. What does it mean for shippers that supply chain shocks have occurred one after another since 2020, becoming the norm? How does a shipper build “resilience” when the source, timing or magnitude, or even existence of the next shock is unknown? Companies are looking to cut supply chain costs and avoid investing in resilience to threats that are theoretical at best. Logisticians who never paid attention to geopolitics are now parsing the headlines for signs of the next blunt force impact to supply chains.
- Shipping politics in the US flipped in favor of the shipper. The impact is being increasingly felt. The new detention and demurrage rule that took effect on May 28 is a fundamental change in the relationship between ocean carriers, shippers, forwarders, and truckers. As was the July 22 final rule on unreasonable refusal to deal. Both emerged out of OSRA-22, passed over the objections of ocean carriers, and after years of shippers’ complaints to the Federal Maritime Commission regarding carriers’ detention and demurrage policies. Unreasonable refusal to deal has been on the books since the 1980s but became a hot spot of shipper complaints during and since Covid. But there are even broader impacts from an FMC emboldened to serve US shipper interests, in terms of how shippers’ complaints are handled and possibly impacting chassis.
- What will the AI dividend in container shipping be? With the power of generative AI enabling historic breakthroughs in medicine, manufacturing, and energy, surely international shipping and logistics will not be untouched. But prior iterations in technology have brought only evolutionary – not revolutionary – change to the physical movement of goods, much of it underwhelming. Is AI any different? Is there a real dividend in the offing for the system overall for shippers, carriers, forwarders, or ports individually?
