The international shipping industry has changed a lot in the past few years. There are changes within the industry brought about by mergers and acquisitions, as well as impacts brought about by the application of Internet technology. Since 2014, when institutions began to focus on investing in the field of international maritime logistics, many start-ups have worked in this field, bringing many real changes to the industry. These changes mainly include the following aspects:
Mergers of shipping companies have occurred one after another, leading to the increasing scale of leading shipping companies and the concentration of shipping capacity. Representative examples include the merger of COSCO and China Shipping, the acquisition of Hamburg Süd by Maersk, and the merger of three Japanese shipping companies into ONE. Shipping companies are the most important upstream suppliers in the logistics chain, and the trend of concentration will also have some impact on the Internet logistics platform model.
The emergence of multiple freight rate platforms has reduced the flying bills that originally existed on the basis of information asymmetry, rapidly compressed the offline supply chain level, and also made the main driving force of the line that originally relied on deleting levels to bring low freight rates to end customers The upper trading model has lost its foundation. The experience of many B2B industries shows that the online transaction mode must bring at least 20-30% advantages over the offline transaction mode in terms of cost or efficiency, otherwise it will be difficult to promote. The international maritime logistics industry also needs to explore another feasible model.
The industry's basic information integration, integration and openness are rapidly increasing. Shanghai Port integrated the cargo information of Shanghai Port in March last year and opened it to the public; the information integration of Ningbo Port was earlier than that of Shanghai; the nationwide truck positioning information was also integrated early last year. The opening of business information of industry leaders such as terminals and large shipping companies plays a decisive role in promoting the transparency, standardization and efficiency improvement of the entire industry.
The rapid increase in labor costs and the difficulty in recruitment highlighted in the past two years have made the industry pay more and more attention to systematization and upstream and downstream interconnection. Just like Foxconn's large-scale promotion of automation to replace highly dependent on manpower, the future international maritime logistics industry will also face drastic changes brought about by systematization and intelligence.
