Maersk Line has launched a digital portal designed to capture the growing volumes of container shipments being booked online.
Maersk Spot provides customers a cargo loading guarantee at a fixed price upfront, the Danish carrier said.
It has been launched in response to growing volumes of containers shipped online by rival carriers, freight forwarders and dedicated container shipping sites. Maersk Spot will compete for those short-term, spot cargoes.
The company believes the portal will help to break the cycle of overbookings and offer a much simpler way to ship a container with load guarantee.
Silvia Ding, global head of ocean products at Maersk Line, said: “It is not uncommon to see overbookings to the tune of 30%, and often this leads to rolling of the customers’ cargoes, since there is overbooking to compensate for the high downfall. This creates a lot of uncertainty for our customers.”
Such digital offerings have been available for 10 to 15 years. But what has changed is that the industry has reached “an inflection point” at which more freight is shipped online, said Lars Jensen of SeaIntelligence Consulting.
Carriers no longer see posting a price of freight online “as a race to the bottom”, and shippers are more familiar with the process, he added.
The entrance of the world’s leading carrier to the booking process is likely to mean more competition for the in-house platforms of leading freight forwarders, as well as for specialised container booking portals such as New York Shipping Exchange (Nyshex), Freightos and Flexport.
But an increasing volume of cargo is up for grabs, with half of Maersk Line’s cargoes shipped on the spot market. In the second quarter of the year, that amounted to 50,000 40-foot-equivalent units booked by 3,000 unique customers.
Jensen believes the total in the coming years will be even greater, with the market for online freight companies expected to grow to between 20 million teu and 30 million teu.
According to Container Trade Statistics, the global market last year was 168 million teu.
Figures from Hapag-Lloyd show that 6% of its container volumes were handled online through its web channel Quick Quotes in 2018. The German carrier is intent on pushing that up to 15% by 2023.
Jensen, a former Nyshex board member, cites data showing its volumes quadrupled in the second quarter of 2019 compared with the same period last year.
“We have a clear indication that the industry’s switch to digital freight propositions has moved away from small-scale tests to meaningful volumes, and we are entering a phase of mainstream adoption of these tools,” he said.
Maersk Spot is available on all trades, except to the US, where it is pending approval from the Federal Maritime Commission.
