ships of the desert
The phrase “on the waterfront” may be disappearing from the
maritime industry’s lexicon. Since ships first sailed the
Mediterranean, business and customs offices have been clustered around the docks where oceangoing cargo was handled.
But in the Internet age, physical proximity to the sea is no
longer a necessity for conducting business, as carriers like
Horizon Lines (headquartered in Charlotte, N.C.), Hyundai
Merchant Marine (Dallas, Texas), and K Line (Richmond, Va.)
have discovered.
The latest ocean carrier to head for the hills—or in this case,
the desert—is Neptune Orient Lines. NOL will relocate its
Americas regional headquarters from the Port of Oakland,
Calif., to the landlocked Phoenix, Ariz., area later this year. NOL
shipping subsidiary APL, which has been headquartered in
Oakland since the company’s founding more than 100 years
ago, will pull up stakes, too. No surprise that cost was the main
factor in the decision. Every ocean carrier is hurting right now.
Many, including APL, have also reduced vessel capacity and
restructured their maritime and logistics organizations in order
to weather the economic storm.
container origami
Those towering piles of empty containers at shipping terminals
around the world may eventually be cut down to size, and it
won’t be because there are fewer of them. If a venture by a pair
of engineering professors from the Indian Institute of
Technology and a former banker succeeds, ocean carriers and
equipment leasing companies will be
able to fold up the big steel boxes
for storage.
Prototypes of the SIMIIT Four
Pack Folding Container, in development for more than three years,
will soon be ready for inspection
by marine certification authorities.
According to the developers, the
folding containers are watertight, and a hydraulic-powered base
station can collapse the boxes to one-fourth their size in just a
few minutes. Because four folded and stacked containers will
take up the same amount of space as a single box does now,
ocean carriers will be able to transport and store more empties
in far less space. That will mean fewer vessel voyages and truck
trips to reposition equipment, they say. A number of ocean carriers and freight forwarders reportedly have expressed interest
in the foldable boxes.
Articles about the containers and a video showing how the
system works can be found at http://simpriinvestments.com/
index.html.
inbound
answers for inquiring minds
Transportation may have been deregulated
decades ago, but legal and regulatory issues
still crop up in just about every shipping
and distribution operation. Disagreements
with carriers and brokers, questions about
contracts and freight charges, and problems
with freight claims are all everyday occurrences. But where to turn for information?
The Transportation and Logistics
Council Inc. (TLC), a nonprofit organization that educates and represents shippers
in matters of transportation regulations
and law, has long published clearly written, “plain English” handbooks on transportation law, freight claims, and cargo
insurance. Now the group is offering some
of the books in its “Transportation and
Logistics—Q&A in Plain English” series
on searchable CDs.
Currently, TLC has made available Q&A
books I, II, III, and VII (the most recent
volume) on CD. The disks include an
Adobe PDF version of the full text. Users
can click on a topic in the table of contents
to jump right to the subject of interest, or
use the Adobe “search” function to find a
particular term or string of words.
TLC’s Q&A series includes hundreds of
real-life questions asked by shippers, carriers, and logistics service providers through
the organization’s online forum, the TLC
HotLine, and its monthly publication,
TransDigest. The clear, concise answers are
written by leading transportation attorneys George Carl Pezold and Raymond A.
Selvaggio. For more information or to
order the books, go to www.tlcouncil.org
and click on “Publications.”
And while we’re on the subject of transportation law, TLC’s 35th Annual Conference will be held March 23–25 in St. Louis.
Workshop topics include recent cases in
transportation law, cargo theft prevention,
how to purchase transportation insurance,
bills of lading and tariffs, and much more.
For details, visit the council’s Web site.
