News / Hapag-Lloyd's box tracker will 'close logistics blind spots'

With two-thirds of its 2.9m teu container fleet fitted with Orbcomm and Nexxiot tracking devices, Hapag-Lloyd this week inaugurated its box tracking service, Live Position.

Use of trackers is already habitual in reefer markets, where cargo owners must keep watch over their cargo to ensure it remains at the correct temperature and pressure.

It has also long been possible for cargo owners, freight forwarders and BCOs to infer the position of their container via ship AIS data – as long as they know which ship is carrying it. But the rollout of Live Position “closes the blind spots of global logistics, enabling real-time decision-making and risk mitigation for our customers, while allowing a more efficient steering of our fleet of boxes,” claimed Hapag-Lloyd COO Maximilian Rothkopf.

Nexxiot  CEO Stefan Kalmund expects dry container tracking will soon become a must-have for shipping lines. He said: “The interesting new capability is in monitoring and tracking the container from door-to-door. Historically, you never knew if your cargo was sitting on the back of a truck, or met or missed the ship. Now, you will know exactly when it is moved – it sends you a ping.

“I think the most interesting thing about real-time data is not so much when things work well, but when there are alarms or triggers, like your container has been delayed, or dropped.”

He added: “An additional service you can provide is ETAs. Historically, the data aggregators provide this, but aggregation means data is always outdated by a couple of hours, sometimes even days. Now, the asset owner can create an ETA themselves, with real-time data.”

Mr Kalmund also suggested Live Position would assist in Customs operations “in the not-so-far future”.

“Certain boxes would be ‘green’, for fast processing, while others would be ‘red’ and need to be checked. So for a cargo owner, it will be very beneficial to transport their cargo with an operator like Hapag-Lloyd which can provide proof to Customs officials and therefore get their container processed faster than everyone else’s.”

Another use case of extending tracking to dry containers lies in safety on vessels, explained Christian Allred, SVP of the other tracker manufacturer engaged by Hapag-Lloyd, Orbcomm.

“Orbcomm’s unique onboard vessel network, VesselConnect, collects data from containers and delivers it to onboard software CrewView for local management of alarms,” he said. “In general, information is not limited to just location, but start and stop movements, dwell duration, alerts when moving in and out of geofences and ambient temperature alerts. Significantly, they will be able to show where individual containers are throughout all legs of the journey.” 

But issues remain over ownership of the data should containers be mishandled. Internal correspondence during the pandemic – some of it still under investigation by the FMC – demonstrates that shipping lines are hardly immune to incidences of bad behaviour. In 2022, the FMC forced Hapag-Lloyd to pay a $2m civil claim over alleged detention and demurrage charge violations.

“I think it is fair to say that people who own the assets and pay for the digitisation of the assets – so in this case, Hapag-Lloyd — also own the data,” said Mr Kalmund. “It is Hapag-Lloyd, not us, selling the service to the BCO.”

Asked whether Nexxiot could be compelled by authorities to hand over data, Mr Kalmund said he couldn’t foresee such a scenario.

“The cargo owners have access to the data if they pay for it – the shipping line has access to the data. If authorities or insurance companies need access to the data, this would be provided one way or another.”

Mr Allred gave The Loadstar a similar response: “We like it when the shipping line provides access to the BCOs – we can provide that access, any time they want,” he said, but added that this information would fall into the realm of the “customer of my customer” – leaving responsibility for accuracy and timely provision of data ultimately with the shipping line.