U.S. manufacturing is expected to keep ship traffic on the St. Lawrence Seaway bustling this season after a strong start for general cargo shipments through the navigation system.
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handled 39 percent of U.S. container imports in 2002, but that figure fell to 32 percent by 2013, according to U.S. census data. They have lost business to competitors at a time when, overall, global trade is booming and imports are rising at all ports, including L.A. and Long Beach. And the ports are losing out to others that can handle larger vessels.
SeaLand, an arm of the Maersk Group providing intra-Americas ocean carriage, has added the North Atlantic Express (NAE) service to its north-south network.
CaroTrans, a global non-vessel operating common carrier and ocean-freight consolidator, has launched a weekly less-than-containerload service from Montreal, Quebec to Le Havre, France.
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.
The dry bulk shipping market is not expected to return to profitability until 2017, despite a modest recovery in earnings anticipated over the next two years, according to the latest edition of the Dry Bulk Forecaster, published by global shipping consultancy Drewry.