Weekly Newsletter

Union workers at Mack Trucks went on strike Oct. 9 after voting down a tentative five-year contract agreement that negotiators had reached with the company.

Following a review process launched in August last year, the European Commission reached an emphatic conclusion that the Consortia Block Exemption Regulation (CBER) no longer promotes competition in the shipping sector. Vessel sharing…..

United Auto Workers has unexpectedly expanded its U.S. strikes at Ford Motor to a highly profitable SUV and truck plant for the automaker in Kentucky. The strike was effective at 6:30 p.m. ET Wednesday at Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant, where it employs 8,700 UAW members to produce Ford Super Duty pickups and the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator SUVS. Ford Motor is "at the limit" of what it can offer the United Auto Workers union in terms of economic concessions, an executive said Thursday as contract negotiations continue for roughly 57,000 U.S. workers.

The campaign for a new speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has sidelined legislation designed to fund the Department of Transportation through fiscal 2024. Floor debate on the transportation bill had been scheduled for earlier this month. The legislation is meant to avoid funding disruptions for most operations at the department for the next fiscal year.

Import shipments from Asia to the U.S. East Coast will be delayed by the Panama Canal low water traffic jam just as the Christmas season approaches. U.S. West Coast ports should benefit. Christmas goods urgently shipped from Asia into the East Coast may not arrive in time. From Asia you can still MLB by coming into the ports of LA/LB and rail across country.

Expectations of a significant rebound in imports from Asia keep getting pushed back amid sharper warnings of years of container shipping overcapacity and even the potential for long-term subdued American consumer spending. Efforts by carriers to mitigate overcapacity via blank sailings amid depressed container spot rates spell sustained deterioration in container service in general for the foreseeable future. In exchange, the market can enjoy container spot rates below pre-pandemic levels. This is a familiar feature of the container shipping downcycle. Service and spot rates levels fell following the 2008-09 financial crisis, only to recover after a fair volume rebound in 2010. Most are not optimistic that there will be a rebound in Asian imports in the first half of 2024. Many importers still complain of bloated inventories while forecasts for holiday shopping are weak.

EY Parthenon and Bain & Co. predict US retail sales growth this year will be just 3%, compared with 5.8% last year and 13.2% in 2021. Bank of America and Citi Group reported a slowdown in US credit card spending in September.

Importers this month are getting a bitter taste of what they can expect more of: blank sailings. The proportion of total vessel capacity between Asia and North America blanked by skipping port calls is the highest since April, at 23%.

External conditions are what they are. Our containerized imports, which year to date through August were almost exactly at the level of 2019, may or may not bounce back next year due to difficult-to-predict factors as varied as tightening consumer credit, inflation, high mortgage rates or student loans coming due.  But how that all translates into pricing and quality of service on the water will be the result of how carriers respond to those market conditions. Nothing else. Pockets full of cash, it was the carriers who splurged on new green tonnage, driving the order book up to nearly 30% of the existing fleet at a time when demand was never going to be sustained at the levels seen in 2021 and 2022 and could remain subdued for another year. And it will be those same carriers who will decide how, and to what extent, to mitigate the impact of overcapacity, including how aggressively to undercut competitors to fill their ships. If they continue to seek market share, they may be doomed once again.

Shippers and carriers in south China and Taiwan are facing days of delays caused by Typhoon Koinu, which barreled across the Taiwan Strait over the weekend, shutting at least eight ports and affecting more than 20 mainline vessels.

Thirty-one Ports in Texas will begin receiving an estimated $240 million in state funds to improve those facilities and bolster the state's supply chains.

CMA-CGM’s $600 million investment plan for its two new US East Coast container terminals is a long-term bet on the shift of US importers away from China and toward India and Southeast Asia, the ocean carrier’s chief said, adding that US ports need to do more to handle bigger ships that would ply that trade lane.  R. Saade said Bayonne and Staten Island will be handling large vessels and must pick up the number of picks per hour to compete with other worldwide ports. CMA-CGM is expected to take delivery of 14 ships of 24,000-TEU capacity between 2026 and 2028. Saade would like to eventually deploy those ships on trade lanes from Southeast Asia to the US.

The International Propeller Club(NY/NJ) has elected Maria Conatser as International President making her the first woman to lead the networking organization in its almost 100-year history.

The Port of Savannah is poised to grow again, with a 395-acre cargo container terminal planned for an island in the middle of the Savannah River. The Georgia Ports Authority recently submitted a permitting application for the terminal with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The facility is to be built on land the authority owns in the shadow of Savannah’s Talmadge Bridge on Hutchinson Island, a 2,000-acre isle that in the 1990s was a CSX railroad-owned wildland. Today, Hutchinson Island is home to the Savannah Convention Center, a Westin hotel resort and golf course, a fledgling luxury housing community and a still-under-construction mixed-use development and marina. The ports authority plans to build three berths for freighters to dock on a swath of land upriver from the convention center and hotel. The proposal follows overhauls of the ports authority’s Garden City and Ocean terminals and decades long deepening of the harbor that now allows larger classes of cargo ships to ply the waters of the Savannah River.

California and the San Pedro Bay(LA-LB) ports’ efforts to establish a green hydrogen market to accelerate zero-emissions operations got jump-started with an announcement from the U.S. Department of Energy today that it will award up to $1.2 billion in grant funding to a public-private partnership formed to lead California’s bid to create a hydrogen hub.

Truckload spot rates appear to have hit bottom after falling from their early 2022 high points. But escalating operating costs and weaker volumes are setting the stage for tough contracting negotiations between shippers and truckload providers, even as rates are at the lowest they've been in a year.

Investing in veterans to fulfill the much-needed job duties of commercial technicians has been a concentrated goal for some fleets. Like the driver shortage, which continues to plague the trucking industry, a lack of qualified diesel technicians is another unfortunate reality in part due to the retiring generation of baby boomers and a decline in trade school attendance.

The USA is facing unprecedented times concerning export cargo both via rail to port and port to port. The process for export shipments follows a standard pattern which begins with the booking made with the carrier/line, we are provided with the cut off, we check the cut-off date, we arrange container pick and delivery, and provide the rail cut off which is advised by the carrier. We then schedule trucker to pick up the empty and deliver back, based on the cut off given by the carrier. Now, Early Receiving Dates(ERD) are changing without notice; many times, 2 to 3 times in a day on port to port and rail to port moves, sometimes preventing return of the loaded containers. What we all are facing is a lack of vessel integrity with every carrier. The carriers ability to get ships into port is also a major problem.

Once a container is picked up and the schedule changes, the rail will not accept the container back to the rail until the new cut off is provided. These changes are happening daily and without any way of knowing in advance. The carriers are refusing to take responsibility, thus leaving us with extra charges for chassis, detention and storage. All additional charges will be billed back with original invoices which show that these are a pass-through expenses. This problem exists throughout the USA and for all USA Exporters.

We will keep you informed every step of the way as we sort through this situation. We expect the FMC to become involved shortly.