strategicinsight
How do they do that?
All of the services share several char-
acteristics. For one thing, they serve
the Asia-to-United States market.
Asia-Memphis Express and Pacific
Promise do so exclusively;
OceanGuaranteed also serves Mexico,
and Trade Direct Ocean is available in
Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
Pricing is just a little higher than traditional LCL and as much as 75 percent
below air freight. Greg Plemmons, vice
president of Old Dominion’s OD Global
division, offers this example: To fly a
1,200-pound pallet from Shenzhen,
China, to Atlanta, Ga., would cost an estimated $2,950 for air, about $670 for conventional ocean consolidation, and $815
with Pacific Promise. Another example:
An OceanGuaranteed customer, which
was paying $25 each to ship handbags by
air from Asia, now pays just $5 apiece.
Most impressive, perhaps, is that transit
times are days or even weeks shorter than
those for ordinary LTL consolidations. In
Plemmons’ example of the Atlanta-bound
pallet, air might take seven to eight days
from receipt at the freight forwarder’s
premises in China to arrival at the
importer’s door. Traditional LCL consolidations would take 30-plus days, while
Pacific Promise would require just 19 days
for the same trip, he says.
Other carriers cite similar time savings for
their services. Averitt’s Asia-Memphis
Express cuts up to 10 days off typical port-to-door transit times, says Charlie McGee,
vice president, international solutions. And a
hypothetical OceanGuaranteed shipment
from Hong Kong to Columbus, Ohio, would
take just 18 days, according to Con-way
Freight’s Wynne.
To importers accustomed to month-long
transit times, those numbers might seem
almost too good to be true. How did the carriers cut so much time from the process? As
it turns out, they’re all using different strategies for streamlining their operations. What
follows is a brief look at the approaches various carriers have taken:
; Averitt Express works with 14 ocean
carriers but most often uses Matson, which
McGee says has the fastest transit times
from Shanghai to the West Coast and
“probably the best-controlled intermodal
network in the United States.” Containers
move intact by rail to Memphis; Averitt,
which is also a customs broker, clears the
shipments while the container is in transit
to its customs-bonded container freight
station (CFS). McGee notes that the CFS is
located just 400 yards from the intermodal
ramp, so shipments usually can slide right
into the domestic LTL system the same day
