AmericasContainers
Target goes down the vessel chartering path taken by Walmart, Home Depot and Costco
Target, the eighth largest retailer in the US, is the latest shipper to charter in its own tonnage in the ongoing battle to keep its shelves stocked amid this year’s desperate supply chain situation.
“As co-managers of the ship, we can avoid delays from additional stops and steer clear of particularly backed-up ports,” Target said, without revealing who it is working with and the size of the vessel.
Big retail brands including Walmart, Costco, Home Depot and Ikea have gone down a similar vessel chartering path in recent months as port congestion has worsened and liner schedule reliability has sunk to record lows where less than one in three boxships are arriving on time.
We keep reading these stories of retailers ”chartering their own ships” and renting their own containers but, with the exception of a couple of companies like Walmart and Schneider, who were importing their own 53′ containers for domestic use, where are all the ”container ships” and all the ”leased containers” coming from, when we are constantly being told that all vessel charter prices are going through the roof and containers cannot be found??
Earlier this week John Lewis in the UK admitted that it had not, after all news reports and BBC coverage announcing this, chartered ships and rented containers.
If these news reports of various retailers starting their own mini shipping lines, how are they intending to operate the logistics of a container fleet and to return the containers to their owners or to re-cycle them back to China?
It’s all very well to publish attention-grabbing headlines but there has been precious little detail on the logistics and business economics of these so-called announcements.
Come on journalists and Target, Home Depot, IKEA, Costco – explain which vessels are being used and how the container fleet logistics will be managed. Could it be that these announcements are made out of frustration and that the deeper complications have not yet been figured out?
It keeps getting reported that the retailers r chartering ships but what r the names of the ships.
Nothing in the market reports.
Whats up ?
Martyn and Capt. J. Maybe somebody finally has found out what P&C stands for.