“When you say, ‘What’s fair?,’ you have to ask a fundamental question,” said John Butler, president of the World Shipping Council, an industry association in Washington. “Do you trust the market, or do you only trust the market when it’s a buyer’s market?”
Understand the Supply Chain Crisis
But American importers — especially small and medium-size businesses assailed by disruptions to trade brought by the coronavirus pandemic — accuse the carriers of refusing to honor their contracts, denying them space on vessels and prioritizing shipments for larger and more lucrative customers like Amazon and Walmart.
Mr. Delves’s business has contracts securing rights to move 1,040 containers a year full of cabinets and home furnishings from China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia to U.S. ports, at an average cost of $6,970 per shipment, he said. But over the last year, carriers have delivered only 166 containers at the contracted rate.
Desperate to secure inventory, Mr. Delves has resorted to effectively bidding for containers, spending an average of about $15,000 per container on 355 shipments, while shelling out for “premium service” on another 163 loads at an average of $22,500 each.
“The only thing that premium and superpremium guarantee you is that you are paying more for that container,” Mr. Delves said. “It’s not guaranteeing that you’re going to get a container, or it’s going to get on the ship.”
Frequently, carriers have refused to confirm bookings on specific container vessels, citing a lack of space, he said, even as his own queries to third-party shipping agents yield offers of passage on the same ships, at rates three or four times those in his contracts.
