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Bureaucratic activism looms to threaten liner capacity management as well as international software trading
Bureaucratic activism has become an acute concern among ocean carriers as freight rates soared in the summer and autumn months on the transpacific routes. Meanwhile, western powers are restricting, if not banning, Chinese software exports.
Beijing, in a precedent-setting manner, has shown no reluctance in limiting if not forbidding capacity management in container shipping through its use of blank sailings.
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How digitisation means thinking in terms of door-to door rather than port-to-port service in the very near future
One of the few certainties left in this lingering Covid crisis is a need to upgrade digital technology from the primitive 1912 Model T era we have today to at least a 1950s level that delivered easy-to-operate dependability.
Anyone who has been working with the likes of Zoom and Skype know how difficult it is to figure out how to make it work, much less how to make it work well. These struggles recall a time more than a century ago when an afternoon's automotive outing was often punctuated with unscheduled breakdowns and tyre changes.
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Saving what can be saved from innovative, but flawed precision scheduled railroading in the US and Canada
The bloom is off the rose for precision scheduled railroading (PSR). In the last year, more expert voices have been added to the mounting criticism, questioning the practice's overall efficacy, however much it is beloved by accountants.
PSR became something of a fashionable enthusiasm, if not a fad, in North American executive railway suites as the mercurial career of the late E Hunter Harrison soared high in the firmament.
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Covid-19 or not, ocean shipping does better than expected in 2020 - can such good fortune endure?
Like the Covid-19 crisis, the state of international container shipping turned out to be not nearly as bad as anticipated.
Yes, there was a recession, markets sagged, and the future looked grim, but it was not the end of the world as we know it. Despite lower demand, ocean carriers enjoyed high freight rates and profitability through large-scale capacity reductions as well as low bunker prices.
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