Natural gas has started to challenge oil as the dominant transport fuel with companies building gas-powered ships and installing networks of service stations on water and land.

United Arab Shipping Company (UASC) has exercised options for six additional 14,000-TEU vessels bringing the total order to 16 ships. The order has been placed with Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) in Korea and is the largest in UASC's history, worth over $2bn, including all options. The order features vessels that will be amongst the largest, most technologically advanced, and most environmentally friendly container vessels ever built.

U.S. vessel imports were up 3.7 percent from 2012, which totaled over 18.2 million TEUs (twenty-foot containers) brought into the United States last year. U.S. imports in 2013 started off at a slow start but ended with a surprising and unexpected surge from July through December. Annual TEUs haven't been this high since 2007, which is a good sign for a strong recession rebound in the U.S. trade industry. So far in 2014, the first three weeks of imports in January are already 5.2 percent higher than the same time last year.

The CMA CGM Group is launching a space-sharing agreement with container-carrying partners Maersk Line, APL and OOCL on three services from the Far East to the Indian Subcontinent, starting in February of 2014.

INTTRA, the multi-carrier e-commerce network for ocean shipping, announced a strategic agreement with CSAV Group, one of the largest shipping companies in Latin America, to make INTTRA a preferred e-shipping platform for CSAV Group's customer base of shippers and freight forwarders.

A bitter dispute between the Panama Canal and a Spanish-led consortium of construction companies over the spiraling cost of expanding one of the world's busiest waterways was years in the making.

The Stifel Logistics Confidence Index entered 2014 on a positive note. Despite a month-to-month 0.9 point decline in the overall Index reading to 56.6, the Logistics Confidence Index has remained above the 50-level for 12 months, meaning the market continues to exhibit a healthy confidence in air and sea freight forwarding. To get a better view of global air and ocean trade, Stifel has partnered with Transport Intelligence to create the Stifel Logistics Confidence Index (LCI), a monthly survey of international shippers and forwarders that measures freight activity across several European-based trade lanes.