why are there space shortages/issues

Good Morning Everyone,

Trust you have survived the week thus far and are looking forward to a great weekend with Family and friends.

One of the requests I received to make comment on was ” why is their such a shortage of space and so hard to get a booking etc.”

There are actually quite a few parts to the answer to this but I wanted to dismiss one of the common misconceptions I’ve heard for a while now.

We are not in an overly growing market place, trade is not that much bigger than before the Covid nightmare, what we have is a reduction in actual capacity……

This isn’t because there are less scheduled vessels but because there are actually less slots available due to vessel late arrivals , port omissions to regain schedule placement/order.

Most shipping lines offer a weekly service to and from our 5 main ports.

The issue is that every time a ship is delayed by a week it takes around 2000 TEU away from the number of slots they can ship in a year, a lot of the services are down to 44 sailings from 52…just do the maths…..

Then add the demand against the actual supply capacity and it’s a no brainer that the highest paying cargo gets first dips on the next booking availability.

Then multiply this by the number of ports these vessels call at on a direct basis all around the world and you can see how this is not a fixable problem even in the medium term.

We could talk about bigger newly built vessels coming on stream from next year freeing up the smaller vessels that could then be moved into the Australian trade and replace the existing even smaller vessels, the cost of Chartering, the imbalance of containers and Australia’s heavy 20ft export vs light (40ft) import but how many hours have you got to listen to me spread the seemingly bad news.

There is only one thing we can all do and that’s maximise our mutual resources and work together as an industry to find innovative solutions where we can all take a benefit.

That’s why we have put so much resource into our Wholesale FCL program, its bloody demanding on us but there is strong demand so we have leveraged our resources and created something unique.

I hope these few thoughts have been of some value to you and as always I welcome feedback and suggestions on what to comment on in the future

My very best