Predictions that the current crop of disruptive digital start-ups will revolutionize container shipping has been disputed by a leading liner analyst.
Alphaliner this week suggested that, despite the considerable hype and hundreds of millions of dollars raised by freight and logistics start-ups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, evidence suggests that the container shipping industry is peculiarly resistant to being radically transformed.
“Since the first generation of shipping portals was launched in 2000, the container shipping market has not seen any transformative change in the way business is conducted,” it said.
“The three main multi-carrier shipping platforms, INTTRA, GT Nexus and CargoSmart, provide only basic software service solutions to handle cargo bookings, shipping instructions, track and trace and exception management and reporting.”
It added that attempts by carriers to create freight e-commerce platforms and marketplaces had “flopped”, while the partnership between Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba with a number of carriers since last year “have generated very little volumes, despite the initial fanfare”. And a logistics cooperation with China Shipping was launched in 2014, but was “silent within its first year”.
Alphaliner further argued that the award of an NVOCC license to Amazon to book freight on the China-US transpacific route triggered “a stream of speculations on how Amazon could potentially revolutionize the shipping industry”.
But, it said: “More than a year after Amazon’s entry, its actual shipping volumes remain very small and the company has failed to produce any disruptive breakthroughs in the shipping market.”
However, investors and tech analysts alike have put their money behind a slew of projects, while bankers have eagerly arranged huge loans for would-be acquirers to consolidate their position in the sector.
