The first incarnation of e-commerce in the container shipping sector came in 2008 with the emergence of Youship.com, which enabled customers to book cargo on a ship in much the same way one would book a flight over the internet.
Unfortunately for the fledgling Maersk subsidiary, the move may have been a bit too ahead of its time, at least a bit too ahead for the shipping industry, an industry that has long been steeped in tradition and resistant to change.
Three companies now leading the charge in the area of e-commerce in the sector are, Inttra, GT Nexus and CargoSmart.
Today in The Container Shipping Manager we will take a look at these organisations and their current influence in container shipping as well as who the primary users of each service are—shipping lines, forwarders or beneficial cargo owners (BCOs).
In the above table we can see a summary of the three companies’ business in terms of who their users are and who is backing each of them.
Inttra is backed largely by shipping lines, including the world’s three largest companies, Maersk Line, MSC and CMA CGM, among others, while GT Nexus is backed by firms with a background in private equity and CargoSmart, although connected with carriers like OOCL, is a collaboration primarily between IT service providers like Hewlett Packard (HP) and Cisco.
In terms of the impact that e-commerce is having in the container shipping sector today let’s look at some of the numbers.
Clarkson has projected that global sea trade will rise to 138 million TEU this year. Meanwhile, Inttra has announced that for the past 12 months that volumes that can be accredited to their e-commerce services amounted to an average of 350,000 TEU per week.
Based on this figure, Inttra will generate a total of more than 18 million TEU on an annual basis, or roughly 13 per cent of all cargo expected to be transported in 2010.
Source : CSM, 09.09.10.
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