International trade is a wild and wooly place these days, and it's likely to be even more so in the Transpacific (TransPac) this fall. In fact, the level of uncertainty has rarely-if ever-been higher.After the recent recessionary drop and the first volume decline since the advent of containerization, up to 500 container ships were on layup. The box owners, both liner companies and leasing firms, used this lull to retire, scrap, not replace or otherwise prune the global box fleet by approximately 3 million units.Now shippers face an unprecedented challenge. The ocean carrier industry took about a $60 billion hit to its revenue in the recession, yet it was only able to take out about $40 billion in costs. One of the very successful cost reduction steps they took involved migrating to slow and super-slow steaming.
展开▼
