Price war as carriers compete for cargo driving down container spot rates
Container spot freight rates on the major east-west liner trades experienced another week of decline, ...
© Czanner
By Mike Wackett
Ocean carriers are burning cash at an alarming rate, with the second quarter expected to have been loss-making for several.
As container spot rates across the major tradelanes remain stubbornly below cost and contract rates collapse, carriers urgently need to remove capacity to improve the supply-demand balance.
Indeed, Xeneta reported this week that its contract rate index had declined almost 50% in the second quarter.
CEO Patrik Berglund said: “The fall from the peaks of last year has been almost as dramatic as ...
Comment on this article
Gina Hinde
June 30, 2023 at 1:46 pmWhat goes around comes around. During Covid these companies acted like pirates and increased their rates to £20,000 – £30,000 per container! Our organisation lobbied government and the companies themselves to keep the costs as they had always been around the £1200 – £1500 mark but they refused and made an obscene amount of money out of manufacturies and distributors across the world causing a huge increase in costs across the board. You cannot expect anyone to feel sorry for them now as they brought this on themselves. If they had left the prices as they were the current economic climate would be in a very different place.
Go Dowdo
June 30, 2023 at 2:10 pmI find it incredible, in fact almost unbelievable, that carrier CEOs are willing to squander the wealth their companies accumulated during the boom period of recent past. One would have thought they would have had the good sense of wanting to protect their gains and not revert to bad old habits of operating below cost to achieve acceptable load factors. Another race to the bottom is apparently in full swing.