Shipowners operating in the trans-Atlantic dry bulk market, where prices have been plumbing two-year lows on the back of acute vessel oversupply and shifting patterns in minerals demand, could be facing brighter days, according to the latest special report released by Platts.
In 2014, the supply chain industry experienced its best year since the Great Recession, according to the State of the Logistics Report issued annually by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals and sponsored by Penske Logistics.
Shipping will require an additional 42,500 officers by the end of 2019 to cope with the expected growth in the main cargo carrying fleet, equivalent to 7 percent growth over the five-year period. But the persistent shortage of officer crew is receding, according to the latest Manning report published by global shipping consultancy Drewry.
Following the Panama Canal expansion in 2016, up to 10 percent of container traffic to the U.S. from East Asia could shift from West Coast ports to East Coast ports by 2020, according to research conducted by the Boston Consulting Group and C.H. Robinson. Rerouting that volume is equivalent to building a port roughly double the size of the ports in Savannah and Charleston.
Liner schedule reliability improved for the fourth consecutive month in May as the aggregate on-time performance for the three core East-West trades jumped by 4.0 percentage points to reach a new data-series high of 71.6 percent, according to Carrier Performance Insight, the online schedule reliability tool provided by Drewry Supply Chain Advisors.
How much U.S. shale oil production is taken out of service will be a key driver of future tanker shipping earnings, according to the latest edition of the Tanker Forecaster, published by global shipping consultancy Drewry.
The volatility of global spot freight rates since the start of 2015 has continued to increase in comparison to 2014, according to rate assessments on 11 routes gathered by the World Container Index (WCI). Price turbulence on the globally important Asia-to-Europe routes has been particularly high in 2015 with monthly volatility increasing 43 percent on average in comparison to 2014.
Just as southern California is the nation's top magnet for containerized cargo, so is the Gulf Coast the most attractive hub for movements of petrochemicals. Led by Houston and New Orleans, petrochemical activity is thriving due in no small part to growth in refining activity and an abundance of cheap natural gas.
