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Saturday mornings, at least in this household, are usually a period of quiet reflection on the past seven days. Shipping preoccupies us for most of the working week, so this is a chance to dip into the mainstream media for a bit more analysis on the major stories beyond our industry. It was hence with some surprise that I was recently drawn to a major feature in the UK broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph with the headline ‘Freight at the centre of a storm that threatens the global economy’. The headline was followed with the alarmist line: “Deadly cocktail of factors including port disruption, container shortages and lack of lorry drivers is sending the cost of shipping soaring.” Despite the dramatic opening, this was in fact a well-informed article about how the current supply chain crisis is a combination of factors all coming together at once. Unlike so much of what appears in the mainstream media, it did not set out to vilify the shipping industry and cast shipowners as greedy tycoons out to fleece their customers, crews and the general public at any opportunity. Coinciding with the arrival of the Ever Given in Felixstowe, four months late after its altercation with the banks of the Suez Canal, the article inevitably used shipping’s most infamous and photogenic moment of the year. Does our industry want to be splashed across the front pages in such a manner? We not only have a great story to tell, but it’s one that needs to be put in the right context and told to a wider audience The increased cost of transporting goods is going to affect most consumers sooner or later and surely it is a good thing that a wider audience are aware of why this happened. Anything that shows to a wider audience the critical role shipping plays has got to be good for the industry, whether it leads to less knee-jerk, ill-conceived regulation being foisted on us or prompts younger people to consider that this could be an interesting career path. The Telegraph piece was notable in that it stressed: “It’s simply a matter of supply and demand. It’s no more complicated and no more simple that that.” It also quoted one analyst as saying, “Before the pandemic, shipping was monstrously cheap.” Great to see quotes like that, but there is still clearly a long way to go in informing the wider public. Scroll down to the comments section on such articles as this and you find that a worryingly large number voice the opinion that the solution to these higher transport costs is to stop manufacturing in China and bring manufacturing back home. Perhaps the next step is for someone to publish the numbers on the cost of doing that, showing that the increased cost of re-shoring manufacturing would be massively higher than current shipping costs. Shipping probably didn’t seize the chance to promote itself when the Suez Canal was temporarily blocked and world trade was affected. The fact that the industry is now making decent returns and more importantly has kept the world supplied with goods in spite of the pandemic is a great story that is worth telling - and worth telling before shipping gets blamed for empty shelves in the run up to Christmas. It is high time we stopped hiding behind the veil of secrecy which seems to envelop our business. We not only have a great story to tell, but it’s one that needs to be put in the right context and told to a wider audience. Perhaps as the end of the year approaches and the traditional TIME magazine ‘Person of the Year’ is announced, it should be joined by an ‘Inanimate Object of the Year’ award-and that, surely, should go to the humble shipping container.

Read all about it

Shipping is back in the mainstream news, but this time it’s not due to an incident, but because the industry has turned profitable. Do we really want people to know that?

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