Latest / The Loadstar / News in Brief Podcast | Week 28 2026 | Hormuz, hub and spoke and air forwarder advice

Transcript

News in Brief Podcast | Week 28 2026 | Hormuz, hub and spoke and air forwarder advice · The Loadstar

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Lodestar podcast News in Brief. I'm your host Charlotte Goldstone and as always, with the help of my guests, I'm going to be unpacking this week's supply chain news. And coming up we are going to be looking at schedule reliability, port congestion rates in air and sea and some advice to forwarders and shippers on new direct airway bill and EU de minimis rules. But before we get into all of that, I want to give a call to action to our latest AI report. So the data is officially in. The Lodestar has launched the state of the AI in supply chain report to find out what is the on the ground impact of AI for freight forwarders and customs brokers in 2026. This is based on our independent survey of over 200 industry executives and this report delivers a definitive look at how operations our operators are deploy, are deploying automation and where the real efficiencies are being found and what it means for your business. So to get a copy of these exclusive sector insights, just click the link in the show notes below. My first guest for this episode is managing editor of the Lodestar, Gavin Van Maar. Hi Gav.
• 1:17
  Speaker B: Hello Charlotte.
• 1:17
  Speaker C: How are you?
• 1:18
  Speaker A: I'm all right, thank you. Very warm. But yeah, keeping, keeping well, how are you?
• 1:22
  Speaker B: Yeah, fine. I love this weather, so this is my natural habitat.
• 1:26
  Speaker A: To start the week's news, we had the very disappointing development that the Hormosco conflict had seen a sharp escalation with quite a few successive vessel attacks and also attacks between the US and Iran. This is obviously a major setback for any kind of normalization in Hormuz or the wider Middle East. But last week you looked at kind of a new source of frustration emerging for shippers and forwarders on the India Middle east to Europe route where there was high westbound demand coinciding with capacity constraints. So what is the situation is this is all disconnected.
• 1:58
  Speaker B: I mean, I suppose in some senses everything goes back to hormones a little bit. But this really emerged during my normal research on the Asia Europe markets last week. And some of the freight forwarders I was speaking to are saying, I mean really in, in relation to the fact that things are starting to, the stress is starting to disappear from the, from the peak season and things look like they might be normalizing but at the same time, and one of my sources was saying, you know, the India Europe trades is, is really constrained at moments. You've got strong demand, you've got full sh. They're having to book a shipment four to six weeks in advance. And what carriers are doing is that they're canceling bookings rather than rolling cargo. So if you, if your container doesn't get on a European ship out of India then that booking will be cancelled and you have to start the process all over again. And prices are going up. I mean CMA CGM has announced a fifteen hundred dollar peak season surcharge per container from the 22nd of July. Yeah, so kind of it's like a new peak season on that particular trade. There is strong demand but I think a lot of it's actually been pushed by capacity constraints and then had a big sort of delve into pro forma schedules and then actual sailings undertaken. And so if I looked at the period between the first I'd take to take out the Hormuz effect, I looked at the period between the 1st of March, March and the 8th of July. Now according to the Easy platform, the Zenitha EZ platform which I use for this, there are other platforms available of course there were 248 line of sailings due to take place between India and Europe, North Europe and the Med51 of these didn't even perform at all. So that is an effective 20% reduction in capacity. May CGM's EPIC service which has OO and Costco as co loaders they had a series of blanks and, and skip sailings, seized IPAC service, similar sort of thing. But the real one was the, or the really noticeable one in terms of capacity was the iOS service, which one H and M and Yang Ming operate. I don't actually think it's a, it's an official premier alliance service but it may be anyway that has basically gone from a weekly service to one every 10 days. It's, you know, basically there's almost blank sailing every two or three weeks. So that's really where that, that dynamic, that's how that dynamic has, has, has developed. Hmm.
• 4:27
  Speaker A: Well, I mean another interesting impact of this kind of Hummer's crisis noted by Sea Intelligence. A Sea Intelligence report this week was that the pricing gap between Asia North Europe and Asia Mediterranean Container Services has widened to near record levels. But by contrast the pricing spread between asia and the U.S. east and west coast, while increasing, remained unre in the context of the past 14 years. And they also compared Asia to North Europe with Asia US west coast spot rates and they found that the gap was relatively stable before the pandemic and it had now become much more volatile and they described it as erratic. So I just thought that that Was that was quite interesting how the Hormuz is beginning to kind of. Well, not beginning but how it's distorting the freight market. So what are we currently seeing in terms of freight rates as a whole at the moment? After a few weeks of ceasefire uncertainty
• 5:19
  Speaker B: I think it's pretty. The evidence is mounting, it's mounting from. It's stronger this week than it was last week that we're pretty much hitting the plateau of the peak season. The Latest WCI from 9th July showed very slow single digit increases. The acid test will be the 15th of July this week when a series of new FA levels are due to be applied on the Asia Europe trades. MSC is trying to get $7.7K per 40 foot CMA CGM. It's going for about seven but these FAK increases are much flatter rises than we've seen in previous weeks. So yeah, it feels like the peak is plateauing and most of the forwarders I've been speaking to and they're looking at bookings for the second half of July and into August they see the forward bookings are starting to come down. There's a big role pool still to work throughout in Asia. So you would expect sort of if the spot rates don't move dramatically they'll probably remain fairly strong. So even if they start declining it's not going to be a sudden off the cliff job. Although sources in the US suggest that when it's peak, Trans Pacific peak finishes the price drop could be quite sharp. That's what, that's what the prognosis at the moment a lot of this is going to play out in the next couple of weeks. So it's, it's, it's been one of those fallow weeks. We've talked about Fortnite Grace Principal before and, and the week we've just had was the in between week where basically nothing much happens except people continue to try and move cargo. So that's, that's pretty much the sort of not the race situation.
• 7:02
  Speaker A: Flat to summarize flat. Gav, I wanted to talk to you about something else. This is. We got a look in this week at the latest on time performance results with Zeniter's schedule reliability scorecard. And in I think from May there was three months of consecutives, of consecutive rises in carriers on time performance but June saw the first, saw the first dip in that. I think it went back down to 37% on time performance which isn't great really. I mean it's, it's very hard to manage this because we spoke about this last week with, with Keith Gaskin on the podcast and obviously he was saying that when carriers are trying to up their on time performance, sometimes they just perform cut and runs at ports if the ports are too congested. So I think that's quite interesting. It's like even if the on time performance is good, it doesn't necessarily translate into better service anyway. One of the ways that carriers are trying to manage this port congestion is through the hub and spoke system. This has obviously been popularized by the Gemini Corporation, but actually this week we saw HMM take a leaf out of the Gemini book with the launch of its first service related to its hub and spoke strategy in Africa. One spokesperson from HMM told the Lodestar it was intended to enhance its on time performance of its ultra large vessels on the Far East India Mediterranean lane by separating calls at the congested West African ports. What do you make of this? What are the details?
• 8:28
  Speaker B: The key thing is that HMM owns the T2 terminal in Algeciras. The Gemini thing was predicated on if you control your own hub terminals and just manage the cargo flow, keep your 90% or whatever reliability between your main hubs and your shuttle, then you can deploy the smaller vessels to go and service the smaller ports with individual markets. And that's exactly what HMM doing. And in fact, actually it's not the first time. We've looked at this earlier this year and you've seen various network adjustments that HMM has made with its premier alliance partners One and Yang Ming, and they've done, they, they've done similar things in Asia. It's not, it's not the full network rollout Gemini has, but they've started tweaking in areas where they've got terminal capacity that they can use as a hub and then direct the larger vessels into those. Earlier in our conversation you mentioned the sea Intelligence report from last week and there was another article in that which argues that global networks have actually structurally shrunk over the past eight, seven, eight years. And the way they've, they've come to that conclusion is by measuring the amount of port to port connections over all global networks. So that's like direct line of connectivity. It's something that the UN Trade and Development Council measures as well. But the point about that is that if the carrier controls a transshipment hub, it's basically able to utilize its assets better. And largely if it can utilize its assets better, then there's, there's more supply chain reliability. It might not necessarily be quicker for shippers in Fact, it probably isn't, but there's, there's a greater degree of reliability in that scene. And one of the, one of the conclusions they made from this was that, you know, for a shipper, if your container misses a ship now, you're much more likely to have a, to have to wait a full week for another, for the next ship rather than a few days, as was previously the case in many of the largest ports. That's, that's it.
• 10:25
  Speaker A: Yeah. It's not great for shippers not being able to get their boxes delivered on time, but it's nice that the carriers are working towards, I mean, trying to mitigate that, I guess. You can't build ports. It takes a very, very long time to do that. So it's interesting the way that they're trying to manage that.
• 10:40
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, a lot of it also comes down to this idea of transshipment. If you went back 10 years, shippers hated transshipment. Whenever their box went into a transshipment port, there was a 50, 50 chance also they fell certainly that it would miss its connection and it would just be stuck in a transhipment port often, which were common user ones, and the box would be lost and it'd be a nightmare. This new era of transshipment we're sort of starting to see now where the carriers directly control it. There's a, there's a whole different dynamic going on there than there was in the past. So I mean, I know that the conversations I've had with ship, you know, largely a lot of them have welcomed gender. I mean they're very skeptical of gender, but they've, but over the past year there's been quite a few sort of convertees to the, to the, to that hub and spoke concept and it doesn't surprise me at all to see other carriers replicating it. It is interesting though that that also will provide a commercial advantage to those that don't. And we know that MFC is on, you know, if it's standalone, network is basically saying we offer direct calls. That's our thing. We offer direct calls to all reports that you need to go. It might take you slightly longer to get there, but it will go into the port that's nearest to you. Time will tell. It'll all come out in the wash. Charlotte.
• 11:52
  Speaker A: Well, we'll keep you updated on the lodestar.com regardless. Gav. Finally, what was on the Lodestar Premium this week?
• 11:59
  Speaker C: Premium.
• 12:01
  Speaker B: There's a really good story about this is happening over in Asia at the moment. Movement of executives from CMA CG owners Siva to MSC's Klaskin, and from MSC's Klaskin to Private equity and SECO Logistics. That's anyone who enjoys the sort of eternal merry go round of the top. The world's top logistics executives will enjoy it. We've also got some deep dives onto Siva's FedEx supply chain. Buy the ongoing Up Norfolk Southern merger. Put 27th of July into your date. That's when the STB is due to announce its decision. And then finally on the fmc, Federal Maritime Commission versus the shipping lines, there's a lot of money at State there, a lot of shipping lines contesting the fmc, rewarding damages to shippers and so on. So all good stuff there.
• 12:56
  Speaker A: Lots of good stuff as usual. Gav, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate your time.
• 13:00
  Speaker B: You're very welcome, Charlotte. Thank you.
• 13:02
  Speaker A: My next guest for this episode is Craig Strickland, Chief Sales Officer at Box C. Hi, Craig. Thank you for joining me.
• 13:08
  Speaker C: Hi. Good afternoon, Charlotte. How are you today?
• 13:09
  Speaker A: I'm very well, thank you. Very hot, yeah, surviving. What about you?
• 13:13
  Speaker C: Doing well, doing well. Just arrived in Dublin, on my way for other business across Europe. So it's a refreshing, as we say in the US mid-70s here. So enjoyed the temperature. But yeah, I definitely have heard some heat that's happening in Europe and of course we were chasing a lot of that heat even earlier this week in the US over the fourth of July holiday for us. So yeah, for sure.
• 13:35
  Speaker A: Now, Craig, since the 1st of July, EU destined parcels valued at less than €150 have been subject to a per category duty of €3. This was after. After the block's removal of the exemption that had allowed the surging volumes of cheap Chinese exports to enter the market freely. We spoke about this a bit on last week's episode as the new rule had just come into force. Obviously it was quite early then to see any of the impacts. Have you seen any impacts at the moment at the Borders?
• 14:03
  Speaker C: Yeah, it's been still relatively quiet because it is so new and recent to the July 1st date. I'll get. I'll get much more feedback from clients and other meetings starting next week on, on Monday. But so far everyone is kind of playing and feeling their way through the changes as they go through. A lot of work was done in, I'll call it early June in some of the meetings that I had had at and attended for some of the forwarding conferences to review what those impacts were going to be. So as of now, everybody is, is kind of, let me put it this way, they're slowly moving through those categories, categorizations and how they're looking to see how those, those three euro changes will affect them. But so far there's been no, no disruption, there's been no I and many of the platforms such as Boxee and other and other similar ones have already been aligned to make sure those are available and covered so that the clients are not going to be left hanging as they try to get shipments processed through the, through the forwarders and other E commerce means.
• 15:00
  Speaker A: Yeah, it does seem like people were perhaps a bit more prepared on this side than they were when it was removed in the US Obviously it is still very early days, but do you foresee any kind of impacts over the next few months? I mean, what's your advice been to forwarders?
• 15:12
  Speaker C: Yeah, the key for the forwarders is making sure that their clients, because as you know, the forwarders don't ultimately determine the value of the goods and what that requires. It's really the shippers. So we have been advising the forwarders and their relationships and their partnerships with their clients to make sure that there is above and beyond redundancy and review of how that value is being determined on that per item basis. As you know, that three euro charge can become very sticky if it becomes multiple units that are in the same type of, of manifest or packaging. So we want to make sure that the forwarders understand that they push that back to the shippers of record to make sure that that is aligned, that they're aware of those and that they are giving good and solid compliance data, which is critical because that's ultimately going to be the mechanism that the EU is going to be using at the different customs and compliance agencies around the, around the block to be able to confirm all of that. So steady as she goes, as we say. But making sure that there's additional discussions and follow up about compliance model and how it's going to look to go forward.
• 16:16
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think something else that forwarders might need a bit of guidance on is this new direct airway bill rule from iata. This saw a bit of pushback from FIATA and it puts a lot of liability on the freight forwarder. When I spoke to iata, they said that this is particularly timely given the growth in E Commerce shipments of dangerous goods such as lithium batteries. So I mean, what do you make of this new rule and how do you see it changing the way that forwarders handle and respond to E Commerce shipments? Yeah, I mean, do you have any advice for than that?
• 16:46
  Speaker C: Yeah, great, great, great, great question, Charlotte. What we've really seen with, with these, these type of movements and IATA of course does nothing in a, in a short or a rushed manner. They've got, they've got compliance, they've got required requirements and other applicability that are needed across their airline members. And then of course, many, many forwarders are, are always members of IATA because they handle the goods that the airlines ultimately take and process and then lift. So with Direct Airway Bill or dawb, what they're doing is they're aligning that to become closer to a true digital waybill process, which as we know from some of the conferences that you and I have attended in the past, this year, everybody, not everybody, let me take that back. There are a large number of forwarders that are still working manually. A lot of paperwork and direct airway bill helps move these forwarders into that new age of digital airway bill processing, which then streamlines and allows it to be continuous with digitization that's occurring across all of the air freight movements, including E Commerce. So when we saw this, this discussion start, you know, this has been going on for, for many, many months. The, the key about direct airway bill is it shifts the liability from the forwarders as quote, the the company's handling or the businesses handling the product to putting that liability on the shippers in a much more specific way. So IATA's response and it aligns with what they told you when you, when you talk to them is they are looking to make sure that amount of data and again the accuracy of the compliant data is correct because with additional with E Commerce shipments not only growing, but when you have dangerous goods or as we call them, dg, hazmat, other types of shipments that are in there now linking more closely to the shipper's liability, the forwarders are going to have to start looking to see how they align with what that data looks like because as they work through agreements with the forwarders and the forwarders then are then liaisoning with the airlines, a lot of those details have to be worked out in agreements and becoming in some cases much more of an agency agreement as opposed to a direct shipper agreement from a forwarder's perspective. So it is going to be, this is going to be an ongoing month's process as they align to that. Ultimately it's for the greater good. It's all wonderful and we can can become more digital in all that we do and get away from paper. But it's going to require waves of adaptation as the shippers and the forwarders align on DAWB going forward.
• 19:17
  Speaker A: Well, Craig, you've given some really good advice about all these technicalities that are appearing across the market. So I'm going to throw you quite a general question now. What are you seeing at the moment in terms of general air freight market conditions? I mean, is it busy and how are the rates looking?
• 19:30
  Speaker C: Yeah, let me give a couple of bullets. And what we've seen in our relationship with our clients and and partners around the world. The key flashpoint of course for everybody is still the Middle East. And unfortunately over the last couple of days it looks like the ceasefire is no longer in effect. That's happening there and as a result it's creating a little bit of volatility in the market. There's been no significant change or disruption across the Middle east. But really what I could say is in general what we have seen, there's no longer accelerating pricing and spot pricing, that's been much more volatile, it's becoming more stabilized. But elevated rates, there's definitely higher rates compared, compared to before the Middle east conflict. A lot of, a lot of airlines are adding lift because Asia into Europe and even some Asia into the US is still growing at a marked rate, which is good for all of us that are moving business for our clients worldwide. But the Middle east is still something that's affecting and causing that. What we've seen, talking to a couple shippers or several shippers that I've been in contact with over the last several weeks has been trying to get into a longer term planning model. We're at the middle of the year now, obviously early July, so we're just, just flipping over to the second half of the year and a lot of the shippers and the E commerce movers are starting to align for their peak season planning. And at least it sounds so far in some of my conversations those have become more positive, meaning that they're starting to plan earlier instead of waiting for later in the year to look at what those plans look like, which then creates more volatility because now you're trying to delay and hold off on what your rates will look like and where you need to lift and allocate space going into peak season, especially for Q4. So so far a little warmer, temperature's a little hot across the market, but it's becoming more stabilized and we'll all see what happens with the Middle east issue as freight has to continue to move throughout and into those areas globally as we go forward.
• 21:20
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's very fast moving. And as you said, the Middle east is such a big component of that, and that is changing rapidly, and that is extremely uncertain. So thank you so much for giving us that overview. Craig, I really, really enjoyed speaking to you today, and you've given us. Us so much information, so I really appreciate that.
• 21:35
  Speaker C: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for the invitation and always look forward to being on with you again in the future to discuss more about the international world of trade and how we can be able to provide visibility for your listeners and viewers there for. For Lodestar. So thanks again. Appreciate the time.
• 21:47
  Speaker A: Charlotte, thank you very much. Wonderful. So that is all we have time for on this week's episode. A huge thank you to my guests, Gavin and Craig, and a huge thank you to you all for listening or watching. If you are over on YouTube and if you're not watching on YouTube, then please do head over to our YouTube channel. I hope everyone that is in a heat wave at the moment is surviving. I'm gonna go and dip my head in a bucket of ice. So we'll see you next week.