Hanjin Shipping Company seeks creditor protection

When a fallout this large happens - it greatly effects the industry. You may not deal with Hanjin directly - but you've likely got customers (or their customers) who do. This "ripple effect" will trickle down to many businesses. Negatively effecting cash flow all over the place.

This is not good...not at all....and it might take months to see the fallout on carriers and other service providers.
 
I think it will delay retail peak season to a point as ships can't port and containers cannot offload. But once they do, everything will need to expedited. Should be interesting.
 
Look at it this way: Business involves competition.. i.e. winning and losing. You can't have competition without also having winners and losers. Just as one can't have a hockey leaugue in which no one ever loses a game. In much the same way business failure isn't a sign that something is wrong with the system.. business failure is necessary to the competitive process. I guess Hanjin lost, and their competitors will now pick their carcass clean... there may be some good accounts up for grabs now.
 
No ... in this case it's systematic. Everyone started building bigger ships so there is way too much capacity. The rates were too low to sustain and everyone was suffering. There was just a merger between Hapag-Lloyd and CSAV as well. Everyone is playing chicken to see who will blink first, but the bottom line is that capacity has to come out of the market. Trucking is the same, but with ocean liners the scale of removing even one unit is huge.
 
That's competition, and they lost. The competitive landscape is constantly evolving.. bigger ships... a wider Panama canal.. drones.. etc etc. all change the competitive dynamic. The folks who can keep up survive, those cannot perish..
 
Yup, not much different than any other mode of transportation, the ones that survive will be bigger and stronger and their will be fewer options so price will go up. The Ocean shipping lines move freight on a such a huge scale (6 or 7000 containers per ship) It is difficult to even fathom when you compare it to trucking. When it comes down to a handful of Ocean lines the big Ocean forwarders will have an even tougher time getting competitive pricing on the water. The 2 railways who move the cans east certainly are not going to get into a price war to move them so I guess the only mode who will be susceptible to lower price demands by the forwarders will be (yup, you guessed it!) the truckers who haul the cans to the customer.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Igor Galanter
The steamship companies and the railroads are alot more vigilant about requiring on time payment too. The steamship cos that I've dealt with required up front payment and the rails generally operate on 15 days, and on day 16 if they haven't received payment someone will be calling that day. I found this out when I had mailed a check on day seven or eight and hadn't given it enough time to get there.. Day 16 came and they wanted an update.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom