A number of retailers and forwarders are chartering ships and even going as far as to formally create a Shipping Line entity. Jeremy Masters, the MD of Shipping Masters, takes a high level look at this trend and highlights some of the advantages and difficulties for these shippers of embarking into new territory.

At a time when carriers can not fully control the quality of their physical product, good customer service should be a compensating priority. Jeremy Masters, Shipping Master’s MD, examines the challenges to improving customer service delivery when very heavy workloads meet centralized backrooms and user unfriendly IT and proposes some solutions.

The aftermath of the Hanjin bankcruptcy covered in Blog 1 was a spate of consolidation.
This has changed the ocean buying position for BCO’s and NVOCC’s.
Joyce Choy – Shipping Masters Development Director – provides some useful rules of the road in negotiating good rates but also maintaining options and spreading risk.

Shipping Master’s MD, Jeremy Masters, highlights some other factors that are critical in carrier’s port selections – most particularly size of the hinterland market and cost and service level to access that market.
He concludes that in many regional ports other factors trump ship size and make those ports very successful without taking the largest ships.

This interview covered the collapse of Hanjin Shipping.
The need for consolidation referred to in the interview has taken place and this has helped carriers to a degree but overcapacity ( and its ability to cascade as bigger ships are brought into East to West trades ) still dogs the industry. This will be covered in future blogs.