Freight Prices News

Attacks by Yemeni Houthi rebels on merchant ships in the Red Sea have hit world trade. Between November and December 2023, the number of containers travelling through the Red Sea each day fell by 60% as ships moving goods between Asia and Europe diverted their routes around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa.This route results in at least ten days more sailing time, so has caused freight prices to surge and has triggered costly delays to production. The region has become a bottleneck for the global economy before.

Sustained attacks by Yemen's Houthis on vessels using Red Sea shipping lanes could have a "substantial" impact on economies and a knock-on effect on prices, a key Cypriot shipping industry group said on Thursday.Attacks by Houthis have disrupted a vital trade route, particularly of oil, as vessels access the Suez Canal via the Red Sea. Some shipping lines have been forced to divert vessels from the Red Sea to longer routes, threatening supply bottlenecks."Where countries heavily depend on raw materials…

Several shipping companies and a few liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers have decided to avoid the world's main East-West trade route, following attacks launched by Yemen's Houthi group on commercial ships at the southern end of the Red Sea.The attacks raised the specter of another bout of disruption to international commerce following the upheaval of the COVID pandemic, and prompted a U.S.-led international force to patrol waters near Yemen.IS THE RED SEA ROUTE IMPORTANT FOR…

Premiums of marine fuel, also known as bunkers, are set for a bumpy recovery in March in Singapore, the world's largest bunkering port, as refuelling demand from the shipping sector has recently waned, multiple trade sources said.A weaker Singapore bunker market reflects slowing activity at one of the world's most major ports that sits on a crucial shipping lane, while lower demand will also weigh on Asia's fuel oil refining margins.Bunker premiums for the most actively traded very low sulphur fuel oil (VLSFO) grade…

Shanghai is slowly emerging from a grueling COVID lockdown that has all but immobilized the city since March. Although Shanghai’s port, which handles one-fifth of China’s shipping volumes, has been operating throughout, it has been running at severely reduced capacity. Many shipments have either been canceled, postponed, or rerouted to other Chinese mega-ports such as Ningbo-Zhousan.With the city due to fully reopen on June 1, the port is going to be in overdrive as manufacturers try to fulfil backlogs, with serious knock-on effects around the world.

Shipping giants are heading for port, but not in the traditional sense. Companies like Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd are riding a record valuation wave thanks to a year of sky-high container rates. Gobbling up land-based logistics rivals would be one use for the cash burning a hole in their pockets. It would also serve as a handy buffer against future supply-chain crunches.Pandemic upheaval has benefitted the shipping industry. Government support, such as checks mailed out to U.S. households, fueled a consumer spending spree. Freight rates have soared.

Much like the coronavirus pandemic, and the economic disruption that it has caused, a global shipping crisis looks set to go on delaying goods traffic and fueling inflation well into 2023.Shipping rarely figures in economists' inflation and GDP calculations, and companies tend to fret more about raw materials and labor costs than transportation. But that might be changing.The cost of shipping a 40-foot container (FEU) unit has eased some 15% from record highs above $11,000 touched in September, according to the Freightos FBX index.

The chaos that has bedeviled global supply chains in recent months will extend into next year, with a lack of truck drivers preventing hundreds of container vessels from offloading goods around the world, shipping group Maersk said.“The whole system has become one gigantic bottleneck,” Chief Executive Soren Skou told reporters on Tuesday.Skou said the biggest problem preventing containers from leaving ports is a lack of labor, particularly drivers of heavy goods vehicles in the…

Tanker rates to ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) have more than doubled since the start of the month as a power crisis in Asia and Europe drives up demand for vessels, industry sources said on Tuesday.The daily charter rate for a tri-fuel diesel-electric (TFDE) vessel that can carry 160,000 cubic meters of LNG to Pacific basin ports rose to $202,500 a day on Tuesday, the highest since Jan. 15, according to data from Spark Commodities.For the same type of ship moving in the Atlantic basin…

Brazil recorded a $19.7 billion maritime trade surplus in the first four months of the year as imports by value fell as the real currency weakened and exports of agriculture goods remained strong, a port operators group said on Monday.The surplus is 14.56% wider than in the same period of 2019 despite the crisis caused by the novel coronavirus, which has disrupted transport systems worldwide, said ATP, which represents Brazilian private-sector terminal operators including miner…

China's fast-spreading coronavirus is squeezing air and sea freight capacity in the country with a spike in freight rates a likely consequence, one of the world's biggest transport and logistics companies said on Friday.The spread of the deadly virus has shut down many cities and factories in China and disrupted global air travel."We are already now seeing capacity problems on air freight," Jens Bjorn Andersen, chief executive of freight forwarder DSV Panalpina said. "Sea freight is also being impacted."Shipping lines are re-routing cargoes and reducing calls to Chinese ports…

The number of ships waiting to berth at Brazilian ports to load soybeans and its byproducts is currently almost 60 percent larger than in the same period last year, according to data from shipping agency Williams compiled by Reuters.At the same time, the amount of ships that are berthed and currently loading is 42 percent smaller than seen at this time last year.Associations representing soy processors and grain exporters said the situation is caused by slower transportation of grains from producing regions to the ports…

American Commercial Barge Line (ACBL) named Mark K. Knoy as its president and chief executive officer in August 2011. Prior to joining ACBL, he was vice president of American Electric Power’s (AEP) Fuel, Emissions and Logistics Group and president of AEP River Operations, having joined AEP with its 2001 purchase of MEMCO Barge Line. From 1984 to 1994, he was owner/operator of The Mark Twain Towing Company and Delmar Marine, Inc., Pekin, Illinois. He began his career in 1973 working aboard towboats on the inland waterways as a deck hand and then as a captain.

Cartel conduct in cars transported to Australia from 2009-12-ACCC; Nippon Yusen was fined $20 mln in 2017 over cartel conduct. Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha (K-Line) has pleaded guilty to criminal cartel conduct in the transport of vehicles, Australia's competition regulator said on Thursday, the second Japanese shipping company to make such an admission. The conduct relates to the shipping of cars, trucks and buses to Australia between 2009 and 2012, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commision (ACCC). Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha (NYK) was convicted last year by Australia's Federal Court and fined A$25 million ($20 million) for its part in the activity. The ACCC on Thursday declined to disclose details relating to the K-Line complaint.

A Container-on-Barge service intended to be an integral part of the regional intermodal equation is gathering momentum – and customers. Quietly, the Port of New Orleans (NOLA) has marked some important accomplishments in the past two years, across multiple business sectors. For example, in April 2016, NOLA’s Board dedicated a $25 million Mississippi River intermodal terminal, capable of handling 160,000 twenty-foot-equivalent (TEU) units per year by rail. CN Railroad signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) a year earlier (2015)…

Three bulk carriers sold charter-free at about market rates. Two Hanjin container ships also up for sale. Three ships chartered to Hanjin Shipping Co Ltd have been sold and two more vessels are up for sale, ship brokers said on Wednesday, kicking off an asset sale sparked by the failure of the world's seventh largest container shipper. Around $14 billion of cargo has been tied up globally as ports, tugboat operators and cargo handling firms worried about not being paid refuse to work for Hanjin, which filed for receivership in a Seoul court on Aug 31. While some ships have been offloaded since then, bottlenecks are forming at some ports and truck yards as containers pile up.

15 container liner shipping companies have said they will stop publishing and communicating general rate increases (GRIs) that are expressed solely as an amount or percentage of the change, says the European Commission. Shipper representatives have welcomed an agreement by  the container lines to abandon GRIs in favour of a new pricing announcement mechanism following a two-year inquiry by the EU into possible competition infringements – alleged “price signalling” – by lines. The announcement grows out of an EC decision to open formal antitrust proceedings that investigate the practice of publishing GRI announcements and whether carriers engaged in concerted practices in breach of EU antitrust rules in November 2013.

France's CMA CGM, the world's third-largest container shipping firm, said freight rates should recover next year after a market downturn led to a sharp fall in its third-quarter profits. The Baltic Exchange's main sea freight index, which tracks rates for ships carrying dry bulk commodities, hit a new all-time low on Friday, pulled down by a vessel glut and slowing industrial demand from China. "Freight rates are expected to remain weak in the fourth quarter of 2015. The market should rebalance during 2016," family-owned CMA CGM said in its third-quarter results statement on Friday.

End-of-year cargo flurry still anticipated - brokers. Freight rates for capesize bulk carriers could bottom next week as owners resist charterers' attempts to force rates lower on the expectation of an end-of-year cargo flurry, brokers said on Thursday. "Nobody wants to lock-in freight prices at the current levels (and miss a November rates rebound)," said a Singapore-based capesize broker on Thursday. "I am confident there will be one more (cargo) push before the end of the year," the broker said. Owners anticipate major iron ore and coal miners such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Vale will release a raft of charters for loading in the next few weeks that will push freight rates higher depending on the volume of cargo, said a Shanghai-based capesize broker.

American grain shipments through the St. Lawrence Seaway are up 63 percent so far this season as ships transport corn to Canada and soybeans for international export, reports the Chamber of Marine Commerce. According to figures from the St. Lawrence Seaway, U.S. grain totaled 765,000 metric tons for the period from April 2 through July 31. U.S. Great Lakes ports that receive and export grain through the waterway include Duluth-Superior, Toledo, Milwaukee, Chicago, Indiana Burns Harbor and Buffalo.

Freight shipping prices have plummeted to a historic low, fueled by a long-standing problem of too many ships and lower demand from China, as per a report in AFP. However, the economists say that this is not a serious warning sign on the global economy. Last week, the Baltic Dry Index, the global benchmark for freight rates for ships carrying raw materials, plunged to its all-time low. BDI, which tracks the cost of transporting dry commodities such as coal, iron ore and grain across 20 shipping routes, dropped ON Wednesday to 509 points, its lowest level since the creation of the index in 1985. The global commodity trade is dominated by Chinese imports of key raw materials like coal and iron ore.

The new sulphur directive for shipping traffic within the North European SECA area, which comes into force on January 1, 2015, is good for the environment but has a significant economic impact on Stena Line's business. The whole of the change program that begun in 2013, and which is to produce an earnings improvement of 1 billion SEK, is to a major part an effect of the new rules. The reduction from two vessels to one on the Trelleborg-Sassnitz route is a current example of these measures. Another example is that Stena Line is now being forced to increase freight prices as a direct result of increased fuel costs. "From an economic perspective, this is one of the largest negative political decisions since tax-free was discontinued.

The cost of shipping Russian oil to northwest Europe had the biggest two-day jump since April as traders accelerated bookings of tankers to load at the end of this month, curbing the number available for charter, reports Bloomberg. Rates for Aframaxes shipping 100,000 metric tons to Wilhelmshaven in Germany from Primorsk on the Baltic Sea climbed 51 percent to 113 Worldscale points, reports Bloomberg citing the Baltic Exchange , a London-based publisher of freight prices on more than 50 trade routes. That equals daily earnings of $47,168, almost three times what the ships made on Oct. 15. Shipments of oil on Aframaxes from the Baltic will rise 5 percent to about 1.7 million barrels a day this year, estimates Clarkson Plc, the world’s largest shipbroker.