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CLECAT joined the meeting of the Global Maritime Logistics Dialogue (GMLD) in Paris on the 2^nd of December organised by the International Transport Forum.  CLECAT has been an integral part of the ITF Global Maritime Logistics Dialogue (GMLD) which was launched in May 2019, which gathered shippers, forwarders, carriers, ports and terminals from Europe and beyond. Since then, several dedicated workshops have taken place, with the freight forwarders’ interests being represented by both CLECAT and FIATA.  The exercised aimed to define a set of commonly accepted key performance indicators (KPIs) for the maritime logistics supply chain. This work was considered particularly important as meaningful KPIs could provide possibilities for improved communication and reliability between the different actors in the shipping sector, leading to a better performance of the whole maritime logistics chain. But with the COVID pandemic it appeared difficult to bring the group together.  

The last couple of years proved again how important the exercise of the ITF is.  Performance information on the supply chain is fragmented and often not publicly available. This lack of transparency makes it difficult to have evidence-based dialogue on hurdles and bottlenecks.  At the same time the KPI’s identified by the Forum proved to be essential but have largely deteriorated over the last couple of years, making the work of the freight forwarders very difficult and burdensome. The lack of reliable date on the advanced notice of arrival made the planning of workstreams extremely difficult for forwarders.   Service quality also was extremely poor due to blank sailings, introduced by carriers to manage capacity on specific trade routes in the wake of declining rates and unpredictable environment, disrupt regular schedules on these routes.

Olaf Merk (ITF) and Antonella Teodora (MDS Transmodal) presented new data and ongoing research related to performance of maritime logistics (blank sailings and the effect on the deployments of services and offerings and direct liner connectivity) and concentration in liner shipping.

This was followed by interventions from competition authorities from Germany, Hong Kong and Mexico. Of interest was the intervention from Barbara Schulze from the Bundeskartellamt (German Competition Authority) providing an overview of the assessment of the authority on the evaluation of the consortia block exemption regulation. Ms Schultze noted that the CBER no longer satisfies with a sufficient degree of certainty all four conditions of Article 101(3) TFEU under current and expected market conditions. Industry concentration has risen considerably over the past years. Given today’s scale and resources of the largest carriers, it is unclear how their participation in a container liner consortium should give rise to efficiency gains according to Article 101(3) TFEU. Furthermore, carrier alliances and cross-alliance consortia have increased resulting in a thicket of cooperation agreements, whereas CBER evaluates each vessel sharing agreement (VSA) route-by-route and remains agnostic towards cooperation agreements on other routes. Overall, the liner shipping market is considered to be prone to collusion in view of the high market concentration. Therefore, the Bundeskartellamt recommends that the largest carriers should no longer benefit from CBER’s safe harbour, and the cumulative effect of consortia meshes should be taken into account.