FBJ 4 FREIGHT BUSINESS JOURNAL


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Soaring property prices, ever-rising rents and now a shortage of container truck drivers. A pain in the proverbial for most freight businesses perhaps – or, you can look on them as a sign that the forwarding business is at last experiencing a long- overdue revival in the run up to Christmas. As reported in our news pages, Davies Turner boss Philip Stephenson subscribes to the latter view. Clearly a glass half full man. His optimism would appear to be borne out by mighty DHL, which announced that it would make some as yet unspecified ‘capacity adjustments’ in the Asia-Pacific region to deal with a perceived shortage of freight capacity. Despite the apparent glut of capacity in Europe, as evidenced by Air France KLM’s decision last month to drastically cut back its full freighter fleet, there are still places where capacity is tight.


There has been a flurry of announcements by short-sea operators of dearer freight rates from early next year, when the new emissions rules come into force in UK and North European waters. Two long-standing ferry service DFDS’s Harwich-Esbjerg and Portsmouth-Le Havre have also shut down altogether, the


Issue 7 2014 - Freight Business Journal From the Editor


It is remarkable how ports have transformed themselves in the last few years from places where ships were merely loaded and unloaded


into an


integral part of the supply chain. Several major port- side distribution ventures were announced in October – London Gateway, Tilbury and Teesport among them. The idea of setting up a fulfilment operation in or near a port estate would have been unthinkable a decade or so ago, although pioneers like Import Services in Southampton were blazing the trail largely unseen and unnoticed, long before the term port-centric logistics had been coined. As industry groups point out, ports are major generators of jobs, many of them not directly related to the business of ships and docks. There is though one notable exception to the rule – Felixstowe, with its tightly- drawn boundaries, has always seen itself as a place to unload containerships and get the boxes moving inland by road or rail as quickly and efficiently as possible. And who is to say that they are wrong? While London Gateway has attracted some business, Felixstowe remains the UK’s number one container port by some margin. Supply chain thinking hasn’t developed to the point where customers of shipping lines say: ‘Please call in this port; we have a major distribution centre there.’ Despite the rapid expansion of port-centric logistics, the volumes of traffic involved are perhaps not quite at the level where they can start to dictate shipping line schedules and calling patterns. But the industry is changing. A lot of new container port capacity is coming on stream, not only on the South Coast but in Liverpool and elsewhere. Now that the pattern of alliances and sharing agreements in the liner shipping industry is once again stabilising and crystalising, there could be big developments on the port front in coming months and years.


By Chris Lewis


///OPINION


FBJ is the only UK and one of the few pan-European Multimodal newspapers. The comments we have received prove there is still room for a hard copy publication with the freighting industry. You don’t have to look at a screen all day!


FBJ boasts the most informative and authoritative source of information with unrivalled in-depth knowledge of the rapidly changing freight business environment.


As the definitive publication within the sea, air, road and rail freight sectors, each issue includes regular news and analysis, in-depth coverage discovering the business decisions behind the news stories, shipper and exporter reports, opinion, geographical features, political and environmental issues.


If you have any stories or letters which should be of interest or any feedback on FBJ, please contact our editor Chris Lewis - +44 (0)208 6450666 chris.lewis@fj-online.com


next issue >> circulation >>


Is there an equivalent to port centric logistics for airfreight? It’s debateable. Time was when London Heathrow’s hinterland was fringed with logistics companies carrying out all sorts of ‘value-added’ activities, but rising land prices and shortages of suitable building space has pushed much of this well away from the airport fringe. It’s unlikely that this situation will change, unless there is a serious rethink of ‘green belt’ planning policies.


Our next issue will include features on France and Scandinavia. There will also be our regular IT Section


and news pages. For further details contact: John Saunders - +44 (0) 151 427 6800 john.saunders@fj-online.com


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Take your partners please! Barring interventions by the Chinese – always a possibility - the grand reshuffle of the container shipping industry appears to be heading for completion. Two of the would-be partners in the P3 alliance, MSC and Maersk, have opted for a less ambitious vessel sharing agreement with each other, a deal which has now achieved the blessing of the authorities in Brussels and Washington, if not yet Beijing. CMA CGM, the third P3 candidate has meanwhile found a berth in a new three-way Ocean Three VSA with UASC and China Shipping, which also neatly ties up another pair of potential loose ends in the industry. That’s it, probably, for the time being – until such time as the industry decides that the shape and size of existing operators doesn’t match the global market.


operator saying that the higher costs impsoed by the directive making them unsustainable. Many in the industry argue that pushing through the new emissions rules, however desirable they may be as a long-term objective, have only served to drive traffic away from ships – the greenest and least carbon-emitting form of transport – onto the roads, where emission per tonne levels are much higher. This is not the only recent example of a well-meaning environmental regulation backfiring. On the railways, tough new EU emissions rules have let to a flurry of orders for new diesel locomotives before they come into force next year. The rail industry complained that the rules were in fact so tight that they were impossible to comply with using currently available technology. Now that the rail operators have ordered substantial numbers of new locos, and given that they tend to last 30 years or more, even when new lower- emission versions do become available, it’s unlikely that they will be ordered in large numbers. So the older locos will probably be roaming the rails for many decades yet. The new limits have even prompted some operators to borrow 50-year old first-generation diesels from preservation societies as they have ‘grandfather’ rights to operate, even though their emissions come nowhere near the new standards. This has delighted trainspotters, but no one else, and certainly not anyone who lives in earshot of a freight railway line.


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