International air and maritime transport: what are the prospects?

Since April 2020, air freight has been suffering: " The collapse of passenger supply has caused a significant drop in air freight, faced with cargo companies that are not able to compensate", underlines Philippe de Crecy, Vice President Air Freight Europe of Bolloré Logistics. Consequences? Today, the sector is down by 45%, massive charters have been made by the major forwarders, rates are rising... and new offers are emerging. Among them, Pax Freighter, "a Boeing 777 -300 where seats are removed and packages loaded by hand", explains Philippe de Crecy, or Air France KLM's SAF, which aims to develop a fuel that reduces CO2 emissions by up to 75%.

On the maritime side, from 2020 to 2021, Anne-Sophie Fribourg, director of ocean freight development at Bolloré Logistics describes having gone "from disruption to chaos": collapse in demand, rising freight, port congestion and container shortages... A situation that is likely to last until the middle of this year: "Capacity is being injected, import services are easing but the market remains tense in terms of congestion. Our challenge is to support our customers in their sourcing strategies and in the face of a major challenge: the decarbonisation of maritime transport by 2030", she concludes.

This is evidenced by the feedback from Éric Javellaud, Senior VP Global Supply Chain, Prescription Operations and Sourcing & Procurement at Essilor. The ophthalmic optics specialist has deployed an ambitious action plan: " To contain our transportation costs while continuing to reduce CO2 emissions, in line with our objectives, we have aAccelerated the switch between air and other transport alternatives, improved the location of our production and stock and reviewed our transport purchasing policy. Finally, we set up an almost daily monitoring of transport to avoid disruptions and strengthen our partnerships with forwarding agents. All this was accompanied by a PIC and steered by a weekly committee. All of these actions are still in progress", says Éric Javellaud.

At Schneider Electric, despite the crisis, the company has a turnover of 25 billion euros in 2020. According to Vincent Lamarche, vice president logistics strategy & e2e network design, the supply chain has made the difference, particularly through the STRIVE program developed by the company. The idea is to limit the number of steps, to work with network design tools to simplify and increase the resilience of the supply chain while meeting our sustainable development objectives," he explains.

How is it that the container availability index does not reflect the lack of containers in recent weeks?

The situation is gradually improving as shipowners are repositioning CT 40 in large numbers from the USA (+ 125% vs. December on the Container x change platform) and are also injecting new CTs into their fleets. The situation has improved in recent weeks in Shanghai and Qingdao. Nevertheless, demand remains very strong.

What about sea transport on the France-Africa and France-DOM lines?

The market is very tense on what is new in particular because of congestion in the transhipment ports (Algeciras and Tangiers) and congestion in West African ports. There were record volumes between France and the West Indies in January and this continues in February. All the North-South markets are under capacity pressure and therefore bullish prices.

There is an imbalance between Asia and Europe. Why don't shipowners send the empty containers back to Asia? To keep the rates high and make a bigger margin?

It is cheaper for ship owners to repatriate empty boxes than to give them to customers to fill them up and send them back, so if they want boxes they pay surcharges which correspond to the extra costs of positioning in France.