Latest News & Insights

The Iranian Shipping Firm (IRISL) has announced dispatch of an Iranian flag containership to Europe for the first time after five years of sanctions. The ports of calls have not yet been disclosed but as per IRISL MD, Mr. Mohamad Saeidi, there are plans for the firm to initiate regular services from the PG to Latin America and East Asia and possibly North America (if sanctions are lifted by Canada, too). The Iranian shipping firm, has a capacity of 100,000 TEU with further developing plans of ordering thousands more, according to Alphaliner.

The first train of 32 containers from China called Tehran earlier this week to revive the historical Silk route. The journey of over 10,000 Kilometres from Yiwu in East China (through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), took 14 days which is around 30 days less than the sea freight from Shanghai to Bandar Abbas. The officials of both China and Iran disclosed that there are plans of setting up monthly rail freight service from China to Iran that could ultimately be continued through to Europe forming Tehran to a transit hub between the two regions. Following the economic slump of China, the economists assume Iran as the main target of China for their economic trade policy of One Belt, One Road.

As per Alphaliner, the French container shipping major CMA-CGM and the Chineses shipping major COSCO have been discussing to set up a new Mega alliance. There has also been talks of seeking possibilities to include the Evergreen and OOCL into the plan to from a powerful and secure alliance that could challenge the East–West trades and to isolate the alliance from the weaker partners within the current alliances, which could be facing financial distress.

As per BIMCO, the crude oil tanker market is predicted to develop robustly during 2016 c
onsidering the 4.3 per cent of increase in the projected fleet following the fast trend of orders during the last few months of 2015 (35 million DWT ordered). Seeing that most of the new tankers will be delivered during the second half of 2016 and considering a possible quiet trend in demolition activity, the market would appreciate higher rates. Nonetheless, with the considerable capacity of crude oil pouring into stockpile around the world, the high rate trend would be for a limited period.

BDI (the Baltic Dry Index) declined another 15 points on Thursday to hit its lowest (504 points) in about thirty years. The index is a number issued by the Baltic Exchange of London on a daily basis which is the estimation of cargo shipping price for dry bulk carriers. This year’s total decline is around 36 percent which is mainly account for the decline of shipping cost for commodities and failure in Chinese economic growth.

During the BCC event of November 3rd, John Holland-Kaye, the Chief Executive of Heathrow airport has announced the £ 180 million investment plan to improve and facilitate the cargo processing. The plan is to reduce the cargo processing time of current 8-9  hours to some 4 hours which is to halve the time while doubling the cargo capacity. This improvement in the cargo capacity and cargo processing time would include but not limited to additional truck parking facility and an specialist pharmaceutical storage area and an air to air transit facility to lessen connection times.

UPS has announced its plan for building one of its largest infrastructure investments outside the US at London Gateway as part of a larger development plan across Europe. The plan is to build a 32,000 sqm facility site with handling capacity of around 30,000 packages per hour, at London Gateway-DP World logistics as a UK hub and UPS gateway for International transportation and logistics network. The facility is anticipated to be ready by summer 2017.

“The plan reaffirms UPS’s commitment to the UK and our confidence in its economy. It is part of our nearly $2 billion in infrastructure investments across Europe over the next five years. Through these investments, we will continue to do what UPS does best, which is to reliably and efficiently connect our customers of all sizes to destinations all over the world.”, Luis Arriaga,UPS Managing director for the UK, Ireland, and Nordics.