Logistics

SAVANNAH, GA, Jan. 25, 2021 (Press Release) -The Georgia Ports Authority moved more than 4.68 million twenty-foot equivalent container units in 2020, up 1.8 percent over its 2019 total of 4.59 million. Total cargo crossing all docks in 2020 reached 38.4 million tons.

“Coming through this year with modest growth is a major accomplishment for Georgia’s ports and our partners throughout the private logistics community,” said Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. “With unmatched terminal operations, superior road and rail connections, and reliable third-party service providers, there are no better run ports in the nation.”

The Port of Savannah achieved its busiest December ever last month, moving 447,525 TEUs, an increase of 24 percent, or 86,700, compared to December 2019. Total cargo crossing all docks reached 3.33 million tons last month, up 12.5 percent. Rail volumes for the month grew 16.4 percent, or approximately 10,900 TEUs, for a total of 77,230. Intermodal cargo represented 17.4 percent of December container volumes.

“Savannah’s capacity to take on additional trade as well as its diversified cargo portfolio – including ecommerce and strong export markets – helped to drive business gains,” said GPA Executive Director Griff Lynch. “Additionally, a housing boom has translated into strong demand for furniture, appliances and other home goods crossing our docks. We remain optimistic that the conditions for growth will continue, but it is too early to know if the pace of cargo expansion will carry on as it has.”

During the time when manufacturers around the world were shuttering plants, Georgia exports held steady over the calendar year, at 2.3 million TEUs. Export container volumes were led by food, forest products, cotton, clay, automotive goods and chemicals. The Port of Savannah maintained a near-even trade balance of 51 percent import and 49 percent export, rare for the industry.

“Efficient global connections make export goods more competitive on international markets, and as our 37 weekly vessel calls show, shipping lines are drawn to ports with balanced trade,” said GPA Board Chairman Will McKnight. “By supporting small businesses and major industries, our terminals are key to attracting and retaining good jobs for Georgians.”

Another bright spot for the calendar year was the Appalachian Regional Port. The ARP handled 59,000 TEUs in 2020, up by 25,000 or 73 percent compared to the previous year. “More customers are seeing the benefit of moving cargo by rail to the ARP, then using shorter truck routes to nearby portions of Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama,” Lynch said.

At the Port of Savannah, growing container trade over the last five months of the year followed five consecutive months of lower volumes.

“Despite the current uncertainty, the Authority has remained steadfast in its commitment to build for the future,” McKnight said. “Expanding our berth capacity, growing Savannah’s crane fleet, adding container storage space and moving forward on the Mason Mega Rail Project are some examples of those efforts.”

When planning and design started for Mason Mega Rail in 2016, annual rail lifts at Garden City Terminal totaled 675,000 TEUs. Today, that number is more than 936,000, a 40 percent increase. At full build-out, Mason Mega Rail Terminal will grow Savannah’s annual rail lift capacity to 2 million TEUs per year.

“Even during the pandemic, we’ve seen successes such as expanding trade with Memphis customers,” McKnight said. “As a major intermodal center, Memphis is a key market for expansion of Savannah’s rail service.”

In CY2020, Memphis customers accounted for 178,000 TEUs of loaded rail cargo for the Port of Savannah, an increase of 3 percent or more than 4,800 TEUs. Memphis is GPA’s second busiest inland rail market after Atlanta.

With Phase I of the Mason Mega Rail Terminal operational, Class I railroads CSX and Norfolk Southern are able to make cargo available for pickup in Memphis within three days of being offloaded from a vessel. Major Memphis exports crossing GPA docks include cotton, logs, chemicals and machinery, while major imports include auto parts, electronics, furniture and apparel.

While the container trade ended the year in positive territory, the auto industry was harder hit, with both manufacturing and sales experiencing a difficult year related to the pandemic. Roll-on/Roll-off cargo totaled 602,748 units for the year at GPA, a decrease of 8 percent, or 55,000 units. However, momentum has increased in recent months, with Ro/Ro trade between August and December up 15,000 units compared to the same period in 2019. December 2020 Ro/Ro units totaled 70,266, up 22.5 percent.

BOSTON, Jan. 21, 2021 (PRNewswire) -Sappi North America, Inc., a leading producer and supplier of diversified paper, packaging products and pulp, today announced that it has extended its current SmartWay^®Transport Partnership, an innovative collaboration between U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and industry. The SmartWay Transport Partnership provides a framework to assess the environmental and energy efficiency of goods movement supply chains and benchmark overall performance.

This is Sappi's 12^thconsecutive year as a SmartWay Transport Partner, and the company will continue to contribute to the Partnership's savings of 279.7 million barrels of oil, $37.5 billion in fuel costs and 134 million tons of air pollutants. This collective effort is the equivalent of the annual electricity use in 18.2 million homes. By being a part of the SmartWay Transport Partnership, Sappi demonstrates its strong environmental leadership and corporate responsibility.

"With sustainability at the core of Sappi's business, we are proud to continue enhancing our environmental freight management practices as a long-time SmartWay Partner," said Anne Ayer, Vice President,Pulp Business and Supply Chain at Sappi North America. "We are thankful for this organization and the other partners for working alongside us to collectively communicate fuel use and calculate freight emissions to lead to more informed decisions."

The partnership was developed jointly in early 2003 by EPA and Charter Partners represented by industry stakeholders, environmental groups, American Trucking Associations, and Business for Social Responsibility. Partners rely upon SmartWay tools and approaches to track and reduce emissions and fuel use from goods movement. The Partnership currently has over 3,000 partners including shipper, logistics companies, truck, rail, barge, and multimodal carriers.

As a certified shipper partner, Sappi utilizes carriers that leverage technology and design to minimize their collective carbon footprint. Sappi works toward increasing the amount of freight moved on intermodal and rail as well as increasing the amount of freight moved on certified carriers.

To learn more about Sappi North America, please visitwww.sappi.com. For information about the SmartWay Transport Partnership visitwww.epa.gov/smartway.

About Sappi North America, Inc.
Sappi North America, Inc., headquartered in Boston, is a market leader in converting wood fiber into superior products that customers demand worldwide. The success of our three diversified businesses – high-quality graphic papers, pulp, and packaging and speciality papers – is driven by strong customer relationships, best-in-class people and advantaged assets, products and services. Our high-quality graphic papers, including McCoy, Opus, Somerset, and Flo, are the key platform for premium magazines, catalogs, books, direct mail and high-end print advertising. We are a leading manufacturer of dissolving pulp with our Verve brand, a sustainable fiber, which is used in a wide range of products, including textile fibers and household goods. We deliver sustainable packaging and specialty papers for luxury packaging and folding carton applications with our single-ply packaging brands, Spectro and Proto, and for the food and label industries with our specialty papers, LusterPrint and LusterCote. We are also one of the world's leading suppliers of casting and release papers with our Ultracast, PolyEx and Classics lines for the automotive, fashion and engineered films industries. Customers rely on Sappi for high technical, operational and market expertise; products and services delivered with consistently high quality and reliability; and, state-of-the-art and cost-competitive assets and innovative spirit.

Sappi North America, Inc. is an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Sappi Limited (JSE), a global company headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, with more than 12,000 employees and manufacturing operations on three continents in seven countries and customers in over 150 countries.

BRUSSELS, Jan. 4, 2021 (Press Release) -European shippers and freight forwarders have once more alerted the European Commission on the current practices of liner shipper carriers as European supply chains are becoming more distorted. The associations will meet the Commission early in the new year to further demonstrate the damage carriers’ behaviour is causing to trade growth at a time of economic recession.

In a joint letter to the Competition Directorate of the European Commission, the European Freight Forwarders Association (CLECAT) and the European Shippers' Council (ESC) have informed the Commission on issues arising from carriers’ ongoing practices. These relate to the violation of existing contracts, the establishment of unreasonable conditions concerning the acceptance of bookings and the unilateral setting of rates far in excess of those agreed in contracts.

This situation is particularly affecting small European businesses with limited financial reserves. A telling example is that a French company producing electric bikes may go out of business as the company is not receiving spare parts out of Asia. Due to the delays and the lack of space, combined with the surge in tariffs, this start-up business is making losses and may not sustain in the near future, as the company is not able to finish its products for sale. The adverse consequences of carriers’ practices are felt equally by many larger companies, including retail, fashion, automotive, cosmetics and IT businesses.

Carriers have been reserving for themselves the ability to change rates whenever they see fit notwithstanding the specific rates and charges agreed. Carriers are continuing to top their rates with surcharges, general rate increases, etc. Similarly, shippers and forwarders are being confronted with refused bookings and rolled cargo if carriers deem it more profitable to accept higher rated cargo for a particular sailing. Unacceptable practices also include imposing an extra fee as a price for accepting cargo at a new tariff charge, simply refusing to accept bookings at all for customers, forcing a customer with contract rates to move it to spot rates at much higher price. For instance, the Shanghai Shipping Index reached a new record high of 2641,87 USD per TEU on Christmas day.

The disruption in the supply chain because of the unprecedented number of blank sailings (up to 30% on some trades), combined with the lack of reliability (with only 50% of ships on time over the last year), has led to the current shortage of empty containers. Carriers are trying to ship containers back to China as fast as possible, simply because there is a need and profits are extremely attractive. But this has meanwhile led to a domino effect in as far as there is general shortage of equipment for European exports. As a consequence, forwarders and shippers are now also confronted with all sort of new surcharges such as ‘equipment imbalance surcharges’ which carriers are imposing. If carriers decide to ship empty containers back to China for commercial reasons, is it doubtful whether it is justifiable to implement an ‘equipment imbalance surcharge’.

Last year, shippers, forwarders, terminal operators and others in the maritime supply chain expressed their dissatisfaction with the decision of the European Commission to once more extend the block exemption regulation for liner shipping, which it considered a one-sided exercise to the benefit of the carriers. Consortia agreements authorise carriers to collectively agree on  blank sailings. The current shortage of capacity has enabled carriers to significantly raise rates on spot market cargo and for cargo under contract. The unreasonable practices of carriers regarding container equipment, rates and demurrage and detention charges present a serious risk to the ability of economic recovery in Europe.

ESC and CLECAT, whose members have been particularly affected by unilateral carrier rate and service changes, encourage the European Commission to take actions similar to those of competent authorities in other parts of the world.