Porti & ambiente — le notizie raccolte

Intra-Asia rates continue to rise year-on-year, as major ports are congested amid the early peak season, and there is a slow return of empty containers. On 12 June, the Shanghai Containerised Freight Index showed the Shanghai-Southeast Asia rate went up by 5% from 5 June, to $682 per teu. This was also nearly 50% higher year-on-year. Xeneta’s chief analyst Peter Sand toldThe Loadstar: “Congestion still seems to be sticky and average rates keep on rising steadily.” Drewry’s Intra-Asia Container Index showed that on 12 June, Shanghai-Singapore rates averaged $1,094 per feu, excluding terminal handling charges. This was up from $922 per feu on 29 May. Drewry said that port utilisation at major transhipment hubs such as Singapore remained critical, with large volumes of displaced containers disrupting network flows and limiting the repositioning of empty equipment into South Asian markets. The consultancy said: “At the same time, concerns over rising costs and potential supply chain disruptions are encouraging cargo owners to bring forward shipments of Christmas goods. The early peak season has led to an increased volume of semi-finished goods and components transported across Asia, especially between China and Southeast Asia.” There are concerns that with the US and Iran agreement to sign a memorandum of understanding to end their ongoing conflict, it could trigger an increase in shipping capacity, as more than 50 vessels of more than 300,000 teu stranded in the Persian Gulf could be released. Peace could also see more operators resuming Red Sea transits. Mr Sand however said it is still early to tell if there will be an impact. He said: “If more transits will come about after Friday – it’ll be very positive – but it will take months before the ‘next normal’ is here.” Meanwhile, HMM is making good on its plan to widen itsintra-Asia portfolio. South Korea’s flagship carrier will take slots on compatriot Pan Ocean’s Vietnam-Thailand Express (VTX) service to offer more services to Thailand and Vietnam, while the latter operator will take slots on HMM’s Korea-Indonesia Service to increase its presence in Southeast Asia. VTX calls at Gwangyang, Busan, Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, and Laem Chabang, using three 1,700-1,900 teu ships. This means HMM will now have three services connecting Vietnam and Thailand, besides its Vietnam-Thailand and China-Vietnam-Thailand services.

WiseTech Global has attributed Tuesday’s CargoWise outage to a faulty data update, but the incident has reopened the wider debate among customers over software quality, support responsiveness and the company’s approach to product releases. In a statement provided toThe Loadstar, WiseTech said: “At approximately 3pm Sydney time on 17 June 2026, CargoWise experienced an outage that prevented some users from being able to access the system. “We focused on restoring services for our customers and full functionality was restored between 5pm and 7pm. We are working through a small number of associated customer-specific issues created by the outage.” The company said customers had been kept informed through its MyAccount portal and eRequests system and confirmed the issue was caused by a software-related update. “Our team identified that the outage was caused by a data update, which has since been rolled back. WiseTech apologises for the inconvenience to customers and we are committed to implementing mechanisms and safeguards to prevent this or similar issues occurring.” The company declined to answer how many customers had been impacted. The explanation broadly aligns with information provided by customers following the incident. Several users toldThe Loadstarthat a reference data update generated login exceptions across the platform, preventing access to CargoWise and disrupting messaging services. Customers running both WiseCloud and self-hosted deployments reported being affected. While WiseTech’s statement referred to users being unable to access the system, some customers said the effects extended beyond logins. One Australian user reported continuing workflow problems after services were restored. “I don’t think the front end went down for us in Australia, however messaging received errors and now all our workflow that uses FLD action triggers have failed,” the customer said. The user added: “It’s not only FLD actions. It’s NTF and DOC action delivery as well.” Several customers also reported having to restart process controllers and manually reprocess workflows once services resumed. However, some customers also praised WiseTech’s handling of the situation. Anton Gunter, managing director of UK forwarder Global Freight Services, said he contacted CargoWise chief executive Zubin Appoo directly after becoming aware of the outage and received confirmation that the issue was being addressed. Despite wider criticism of CargoWise in recent months, Mr Gunter said he remained strongly supportive of the platform. “The introduction of the Value Packs saw a lot of heartache till we understood what was going on,” he toldThe Loadstar. “Don’t get me wrong, the rollout was not the best, but to be fair to the CEO he stood up when many thought he would hide away and fronted up to a lot of questions from me. “Haters will always hate. Too expensive, no support, complicated etc… is what I have heard from some haters. In fact whilst the costs might be elevated, the database is constantly evolving and that carries a cost.” He added: “Support can be better if not quicker. Support is based on a self-help basis, and this sometimes is my criticism of the system, so hopefully that will change but if our onboarding all those years ago is still the same for new companies, they will get taught everything they need to know. A bi-yearly exam means you get a discount for having some knowledge. “There is no doubt that the support of CargoWise has changed. At times they are reactive and at times they are proactive. [But] we have always been able to get support.” However, other customers said the outage had reinforced concerns they already had about the platform. One customer toldThe Loadstarthe incident itself was less concerning than what they viewed as a deterioration in software quality over recent months. “The build quality of the software updates in the last month has gone completely downhill, with random errors and issues for things that were never a problem in the past, and their support responsiveness is almost non-existent,” the customer said. Others pointed to growing frustration with CargoWise’s release cadence following the rollout of CargoWise Value Packs. Several users claimed WiseTech was now deploying updates more frequently and with less advance notice than under previous release cycles, creating challenges for customers managing integrations and downstream systems. One customer cited a recent incident in which a CargoWise update reportedly interrupted the transmission of accounts payable invoices from CargoWise into an external finance system at a large US logistics provider. “Despite the price hikes, service issues, and outages,WiseTech is still winning medium and large forwarders. No one is yet making a dent in their dominance. Sure a few small companies are leaving, and DSV, but they won’t miss earnings in August,” he said. The incident comes at a sensitive time for WiseTech. The company has faced criticism from some customers over the rollout of CargoWise Value Packs, while DSV has confirmed plans to migrate away from CargoWise following its acquisition of DB Schenker, opting instead to standardise Schenker’s Tango platform over time. At the same time, many forwarders are becoming increasingly dependent on the software. Australian forwarder Neolink recently toldThe Loadstarthat workflow automation and AI tools built on CargoWise had enabled it to almost double shipment volumes and profitability over the past three years without a corresponding increase in headcount. Such reliance means even relatively short disruptions can have significant operational consequences. The differing reactions to Tuesday’s outage highlight CargoWise’s unique position in the forwarding industry. While many customers remain committed to the platform and see no viable alternative, others are increasingly questioning whether WiseTech is maintaining the balance between innovation, software stability and customer support. WiseTech has not commented further on the incident.

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Vacancy rates in the cold storage sector are at historically high rates. The development pipeline for new facilities is at a record low, which suggests a bright future beyond the current pain. This week Vertical Cold Storage acquired a refrigerated warehouse in Dothan, Alabama from Dothan Warehouse for an undisclosed sum. It is the second temperature-controlled facility that Vertical has bought in the town in two years. While the first warehouse caters primarily to the poultry sector, the new one is focused on peanut shelling and storage. Dothan is located in the heart of the US peanut production region. Depending on your lens, this may be a brilliant strategic move, or the worst time to buy cold storage property. According to a report published in March by commercial real estate service firm Newmark, the US vacancy rate has hit a 20-year high. Notwithstanding some improvement, recent financial results of the top players have been bleak, and comments from their top emphasised cost control and discipline. Americold reported a 0.1% year-on-year rise in revenues to $629.9m (down 1.9% on a constant currency basis) and a net loss of $13.6m. CEO Rob Chambers noted that the result was above expectations and stressed that “our teams remain tightly focused on pricing discipline, cost control and delivering excellent service to customers”. Lineage Logistics reported a $51m net loss for the quarter, while revenues grew less than 1% to $1.3bn. Propelled by a rapid expansion triggered by the pandemic, absorption has lagged the growth in capacity. According to Lineage, in the fourth quarter of 2025, available space was up 15%, whereas demand had grown 5%. Demand continues to be burdened by high food prices that strain consumers’ budgets and slow consumption growth, Newmark’s report highlighted. “Weak consumer sentiment, heightened uncertainty, and significant volatility have weighed on category growth and impacted consumer purchase patterns, resulting in a slower pace and higher cost of volume recovery than initially expected,” its authors wrote. At the same time, warehouse operators and their clients have been struggling with higher costs, largely due to Washington’s tariffs and the inflation they triggered, a survey by Lineage of 1,000 clients from the food and beverage sector shows. According to Newmark, average cold storage rents have risen over 100% since 2020. On a positive note, the facility development pipeline has shrunk to its lowest level in 20 years, Newmark reported. Its analysts see the market at an inflection point. Going forward, they see demand outpace capacity expansion, despite the cost pressure. In Lineage’s customer survey, 72% reported rising demand for refrigerated and frozen foods. Newmark’s analysts identified the rise of online grocery shopping, which expanded 32% last year, as a principal driver of growing demand for cold storage capacity, noting that home delivery is more cold chain-extensive than in-store shopping. The cold chain needs of the ever-growing pharma industry is a second catalyst for rising demand, they noted. In addition, they pointed to population growth, especially in areas like Dallas/Fort Worth, that is pushing up demand for cold storage facilities. While cold storage executives are looking forward to more favourable market conditions, the improvement will take time to unfold, Newmark’s report warned. As current construction projects are being completed, supply will continue to outpace absorption in the near term, they wrote. The wait will likely be longer for owners and operators of older cold storage infrastructure. According to Newmark, there is a clear bifurcation separating modern and older warehouses. Whereas the vacancy rate of modern buildings was 2.7% in the last quarter of 2025, it reached 7.6% for legacy warehouses. Of the vacancies last year 73% were for older buildings.

When economists want to take the temperature of global trade, they increasingly look not at GDP revisions or purchasing manager indices, but at a number that was largely unknown outside freight circles a decade ago: the container shipping rate. The price of moving a 40-foot steel box from Shanghai to Rotterdam has become one of the most watched figures in international commerce — a raw, real-time signal that cuts through the noise of lagging indicators and tells you, with reasonable accuracy, what is actually happening in the global economy right now. The framing isn’t new, but it has sharpened considerably. The effects ripple well beyond the carriers and freight forwarders most obviously exposed to rate movements. Businesses operating in the secondary container market — companies likeshippingcontainerservices.com.au, which sells retired units for construction, portable buildings, and storage — are among the less obvious but telling downstream indicators. When freight rates fall hard and carriers accelerate fleet decommissioning, the supply of ex-shipping containers entering the secondary market increases, prices soften, and demand from builders and developers tends to follow. It is the container economy at one remove, but it tracks the same underlying forces. Understanding why that shift has happened requires understanding what container rates actually measure — and what they don’t. The Drewry World Container Index, the Freightos Baltic Index, and the Shanghai Containerised Freight Index are the three benchmarks most closely watched by analysts. Each tracks spot rates across major trade lanes — transpacific, Asia-Europe, transatlantic — and each tells a slightly different part of the story. What they collectively capture is the balance between capacity and demand on the world’s busiest shipping corridors. When manufacturers are restocking, retailers are pulling forward inventory ahead of tariff changes, or consumer spending in destination markets is strong, demand for container space rises and rates follow. When factories slow, retail order books thin, or overcapacity floods the market, rates fall — sometimes sharply. The critical insight is directionality. It is not the absolute rate level that matters most but the rate of change and the sustained trend. A rate that doubles in three months and then stays elevated tells a different story than one that spikes and immediately reverses. The former suggests genuine demand pressure; the latter suggests a supply shock — a port congestion event, a canal disruption, a sudden carrier capacity withdrawal — that the market has judged to be temporary. The 2020–2022 container rate surge remains the most instructive case study in modern freight history. Rates on the Asia-to-US West Coast lane rose from roughly $2,000 per FEU pre-pandemic to over $20,000 at their peak in late 2021. Every major inflation report published in that period referenced supply chain pressure as a primary contributor, and container rates were exhibit A. What the rates were telling anyone paying attention was that the post-pandemic demand surge — heavily weighted toward goods rather than services — had collided with a container fleet and port infrastructure never designed to absorb it. The signal was clear well before the mainstream narrative caught up. Freight analysts flagged the early rate acceleration in mid-2020; it took most central banks until 2021 to fully price supply-side inflation into their models. The reversal was equally instructive. When rates began falling in late 2022, the signal preceded the widely reported inventory glut — retailers who had over-ordered during the shortage era found themselves sitting on excess stock precisely because they had ignored or misread what the moderation in rate growth was telling them. The current environment presents a more complicated read. Container volumes on the major trade lanes have been rising — China export growth has remained resilient despite headwinds, and some lanes are seeing demand levels that would ordinarily support firm rates. Yet spot rates have continued to soften or trade sideways on many corridors, creating an apparent disconnect that deserves examination. The most credible explanation is structural overcapacity. The orderbook of new container vessels placed during the rate boom of 2021–2022 has been delivering steadily, adding capacity to a market that the demand recovery has not fully absorbed. Carriers have responded with blank sailings and capacity management programmes, but the underlying supply surplus is significant enough that rates have remained under pressure even as volumes tick upward. This divergence matters beyond freight circles. An economy generating genuine demand for goods but facing artificially depressed freight rates due to overcapacity means the rate signal is partially distorted. Using rates alone as a demand barometer in this environment would lead to an underestimate of actual trade activity. The correction is to track rates alongside vessel utilisation rates, booking lead times, and equipment availability — a more complete picture of what is actually moving through the system. Adding further complexity in 2025 and into 2026 has been the wave of tariff announcements and revisions from the United States. Tariffs create front-loading behaviour: importers accelerate shipments ahead of implementation dates, generating artificial demand spikes that push rates up — followed by sharp demand cliffs when the front-loading window closes and order flow normalises or falls below trend. This means rate movements on the transpacific lane in particular have become harder to interpret at the signal level. A rate spike driven by tariff front-loading is not the same as a rate spike driven by healthy consumer demand, but the freight index will record both identically. Analysts distinguishing between the two have been paying close attention to the composition of what is actually being shipped, not just the aggregate volume. Container shipping rates have matured from a niche freight metric into a genuine macroeconomic tool. They are imperfect — distorted by capacity cycles, geopolitical shocks, and policy-driven front-loading — but so is every leading indicator. Used in conjunction with other data, and read with an understanding of what is driving direction rather than just the direction itself, they remain among the most honest and timely windows into the state of global trade. The next time a rate index moves significantly, it is worth asking not just what it means for your shipping budget — but what it might be telling you about what comes next. This post was sponsored by SCS Australia

Opportunities are in the offing for forwarders and logistics operators, as the EU and the UK appear to be in sync when it comes to signing free trade agreements (FTA) with third nations, according to DHL, as the UK pushes hard for a deal with the Mercosur countries. In the first six months of 2026, the EU 27 had concluded three major deals, having signed a decades-in-the-making agreement in India in January, sandwiched in between an FTA with Mexico and its May agreement with the 10-member South American bloc, Mercosur. The deals come against a cacophonous noise of global trade being in retreat and the break-up of the post-war world order, but for chief executive officer for Europe of DHL Express, Mike Parra, the deals typify the manner in which global trade reacts to crises. Speaking toThe Loadstar, Mr Parra said that he expected the deals the EU had entered into this year would “bear fruit” imminently, pushing back on those suggestions that global trade may be entering its dying moments. “Global trade is too big to fail, because trade is like water, it will find its lowest point, and it will find its way, and that is what’s happening, we just need to look at the shift that has taken place between China and Asia Pacific,” Mr Parra continued. “Their biggest trade lane was the US. That has shifted now to into Europe. So, trade will find its way. And this is something we have been explaining to governments, including in the US where I spoke to the House, the Senate, even the White House and said, ‘trade equals jobs’.” That shifting shape of trade has not broken down the interconnectedness of the global market, rather it is lighting up new epicentres, with Mr Parra noting that Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Türkiye – in his jurisdiction – are looking particularly exciting. But he was keen to note the synchronicity between what is happening when it comes to deal-making by the EU and the UK, with the former’s massive FTA with India coming less than six months on from the UK’s own post-Brexit India agreement. And while the arrangement between the UK and Mexico has been in place for the better part of quarter of a century, Mr Parra noted that it is now following in the EU’s wake by looking to tie up a deal with Mercosur bloc. Taking effect some 25 years after negotiations first began, the EU-Mercosur deal will remove duties on 91% of EU exports, including cars, from a current 35% over a 15-year term with the EU progressively removing duties on 92% of Mercosur exports over a period of up to 10 years. Noting that the trade corridor between the two blocs already exceeded €100bn in value, chief executive of air and ocean at Rhenus, Jan Harnisch, said that the deal would “change things in a very concrete way”. UK minister of state for trade, Chris Bryant, last year not only described a deal with the bloc as a “no brainer” but suggested while there would be “difficult conversations to be had”, he believed it would be possible to take much of the EU-Mercosur agreement to speed things up. Mr Parra is not alone in his excitement over the deals being struck by European governments, with forwarders having toldThe Loadstarthat EU-Latin America (and to some extent UK-Latin America) trade has represented one of the moment’s biggest bright points. AGL Cargo’s Jackson Campos has spoken positively about the burgeoning trade corridor, tellingThe Loadstarthat, “now there is a new agreement between Mercosur and the EU that promises to increase movement further”. Should the UK reach an agreement the feeling seems to be that this would prove equally as positive, particularly with the strong reputation UK brands hold in the region.

DP World looks set to finally break into the US market after entering into an “exclusive negotiation agreement” for a long-term lease to develop and operate a container terminal at the Gulf coast port of Corpus Christi. The Texan port is currently a major export gateway for US LNG and crude oil shipments but currently has no container handling capabilities, and under the development being discussed by DP World and the port authority, the Dubai-headquartered operator “would design, build, and operate a new container terminal, expanding capacity and strengthening supply chain connectivity across the Gulf coast”. Currently, the vast majority of container volumes in the western part of the Gulf are handled at the three terminals at Houston, which hosts some 30 container services and last year saw a throughput of just over 3.6m teu. Houston’s total capacity is currently 4.3m teu, indicating a 2025 utilisation rate of 85% and suggesting the region is in need of more terminal capacity. “The US Gulf coast is one of the nation’s most important trade and economic corridors, and demand for efficient, resilient port infrastructure continues to grow,” Brian Enright, chief executive of DP World in the Americas, said. “The Port of Corpus Christi presents a significant opportunity to expand container capacity, strengthen supply chain connectivity, and create new pathways for American businesses to access global markets. “We look forward to working closely with the port authority, local labour, and other stakeholders to deliver a world-class terminal that supports job creation, attracts new trade flows, and generates long-term economic value for South Texas and the broader US economy,” he added. The negotiations began following the port’s completion of the capital dredge of its access channel allowing the access of larger ships to the port. “Completion of the landmark Corpus Christi Ship Channel Improvement Project in June 2025 – thanks largely to investments by the federal government – has unlocked the potential for existing port customers to meet evolving demands of the global marketplace while spurring additional cargo diversification,” Kent Britton, chief executive of the Port of Corpus Christi, said. “Entering into exclusive negotiations with DP World is another important step in our long-term strategy to expand the port’s capabilities, deliver greater value to our customers, and ignite investment in the Coastal Bend,” he added. While the negotiations will “focus on terminal design, capacity planning, and investment structure”, if the partners press ahead with the project, it would “mark DP World’s first container terminal development in the country after it wasnotoriouslypressured into relinquishing control of six US terminals during its acquisition of P&O Ports in 2006. “DP World’s global expertise in terminal operations and integrated logistics makes them a strong partner as we explore the development of container services at the port,” Mr Britton added. The most likely possible site in Corpus Christi is the La Quinta Terminal Gateway, which reportedly has 1,300 acres set aside for future port development projects.