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FIATA has called for competition authorities to pay special attention to these developments.
The maritime supply chain continues to see record disruptions, unpredictability, and sky-high freight rates. Despite being key to being able to find solutions in the supply chain across the modes of transport, freight forwarders have been faced with moves by certain shipping lines to cut or restrict their access to services.
Just three shipping alliances already dominate circa 80 percent of the global shipping market and 95 percent of critical East-West trade lanes and continue to expand their services far outside their port-to-port activities, demonstrating crucial imbalances that are currently hindering, rather than facilitating, much-needed solutions. In the world of big data, technological advancements threaten to accelerate this.
2020 and 2021 were very profitable years for shipping lines, which allowed them to invest to expand into services traditionally offered by the freight forwarding industry, with ambitions to become vertically integrated providers of door-to-door logistics solutions. Some shipping lines have also recently invested in logistics companies in line with this objective. FIATA has addressed this on various occasions well before the pandemic, underlining that competition must take place on a level playing field. Read more
Source: FIATA
