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Don't count out China - the only source of competence that delivers goods shippers pay extra to get
What Honolulu's Matson line has discovered may well be copied by other shipping lines in months and years to come - that is, that premium prices for speed and reliability can and will be paid by shippers.
As Matthew Cox, Matson’s CEO, puts it, times of Covid crisis have seldom been better for the shipping line. Driven by online shopping and ecommerce, the world wants more and more from China and it wants it now
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To achieve a Blue Economy for the world, the road most travelled will be digitisation, efficiency and cost savings
A junior shipping journalist in Montreal in 1968 reported that the 4,000 dockers serving the harbour were furious at arrival the port's first containership and gantry crane. Fifty three years later, news of another dock strike in the Port of Montreal came with news that there were barely 1,000 dockers to serve the port today.
Half a century ago, Montreal was easily the biggest port in Canada and the biggest port in the Americas outside New York. While the amount of cargo crossing New York and Montreal docks has vastly increased since, both have surrendered their top port titles to west coast rivals of LA/Long Beach in one case and to Vancouver in the other.
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Can weaponising trade be justified when honest business principles become impossible to apply between countries?
Market access has been used as a diplomatic weapon on both sides in the current trade war and appears to be carried out without break regardless of the highly antagonistic regime change that has occurred in the US.
However much the new Democrat administration differs from the previous Republican one - and it is light years apart on domestic and many aspects of foreign policy - the two are largely united on China.
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Biden and Trump's China policy differ little, but indicate a testing period of key performance indicators in trade deal
While campus radicalism gives new hope to tax and spend bureaucratic activists in today's White House, President Joe Biden's China trade policy seems little different from that of former president Donald Trump's.
Apart from making agreeable multilateral noises, saying the US will work with allies, the Biden Administration policy on China is as hardnosed as Trump's “America first” stance, noted by Australian strategic research institute, Future Directions International (FDI).
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