MSC – The drive to be bigger and better
Jeremy Masters – the MD of Shipping Masters – makes a high level assessment of where MSC’s relentless drive for critical mass lies in the range between robust strategy and calculated gamble.
Carriers versus shippers – Behaving reasonably when you have the upper hand
Shipping Masters MD – Jeremy Masters – takes a look at look at the evolution of the power balance between carriers and their customers and suggests profit maximization should not be the sole driver in the relationship.
Do you want to start a Shipping Line ?
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.
Carrier customer service – Why is it not better and what are the solutions ?
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.
Choosing Container carriers in a more consolidated industry
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.
Is the size of ship a port can take the pivotal criteria in its competitiveness ?
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.
Television interview of Jeremy Masters with CNBC Squawk Box September 2016
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.