TPM: Huge rise in cargo theft prompts call for federal help
A huge rise in cargo theft in the US has left stakeholders pushing for “federal ...
© Braendan Yong
Freight forwarders have responded to this week’s demand by shippers for an end to surcharges, claiming it is a call they have already made.
Yesterday, The Loadstar reported that the Global Shippers Forum (GSF) had set a deadline of 2020 to eliminate what it called “additional and often arbitrary charges, applied by some shipping lines and forwarders to the contracted costs of moving freight containers”.
However, Robert Keen, director general of the British International Freight Association (BIFA), told The Loadstar that forwarder organisations have had the ...
Comment on this article
Oliver Hilgers
August 03, 2016 at 8:56 amDont’t know if Ishould cry or laugh about this article which is just scretching the surface of transportation costs.
Is it not well known since the last years that carriers couldn’t continiously generate a positive turnover on seafreights ?
By the way, most of the forwarders has suffered as well due to the volatile and transparent market.
But the local shipping agencies, mostly operated as a branch office, tried their utmost to generate a local positive turnover. The only way to do this is to create new surcharges such as import release fee/documention fee/or others.
Please correct me if it’s wrong but the carrier just copy the way how forwarders generates additional income, besides the transparent seafreight market.
The fight for market shares and the competition results in grapping for customers and driving the seafreight income close to zero or even to negative figures.
The CFR term is just another but historical issue, to participate on the lack of market Information on the consignee side.
If the Clients want to avoid such additional surprices, they just have to sign a contract and exclude all non mentioned surcharges and/or to write down the exceptions e.g. war risk or piracy…