FreightWaves SONAR: Will Ocean Carriers Scale Back Sailing Cancellations?
Container-liner schedules are about to provide a telling clue on U.S. cargo demand.
Container-liner schedules are about to provide a telling clue on U.S. cargo demand.
Throughout last year and year-to-date, the Class I railroads and the truckload-based intermodal companies have highlighted the soft truckload market as one of the major reasons for a lack of intermodal volume growth. The depth of the truckload weakness and how it may be changing can be illustrated from data provided by the FreightWaves SONAR software platform.
The Class I railroads and the truckload-based domestic intermodal marketing companies have all finished reporting their first-quarter 2020 earnings. For the Class I railroads, the theme of their earnings reports was that operational and cost efficiency improvements are continuing, even as steep volume contraction has stopped any thought of revenue growth for the time being.
U.S. ports should see sharply lower container imports in the second quarter, but throughput could pick up in the second half—assuming there is not a major resurgence of coronavirus cases.
Railway Age has partnered with freight transportation intelligence provider FreightWaves to expand its coverage of logistics and near-time analytics. FreightWaves is sponsoring a new channel, “Freight Forecasting,” on www.railwayage.com.
With fears that the world is so overflowing with crude oil that markets will literally run out of places to put it, attention has turned to another option to hold it: railcars. But it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, so those who need to be sure those railcars are available for other uses can breathe a sigh of relief.
The coronavirus is severely disrupting container shipping and global supply chains in 2020, but that’s just the beginning. The pandemic is laying the foundation for permanent changes to the business of international trade.
The smallest of the standardized ocean containers in the global fleet remains ideal for dense, heavy agricultural goods, forest products and machinery shipments.
North American rail managers are good at managing costs, but 2020 might be their ultimate challenge. Let’s say you are in charge at a freight railroad. What do you do in such hard times with so many fixed costs? You can ratchet down variable costs. That’s easy. The tougher part is twisting a large part of those fixed costs into segments of variable costs. How do you do that? Let’s start by defining what these railroad costs are.
True or false: Freight rail growth might require fewer cars in the future. As Class I railroads reported their 1Q2020 and full-year 2019 quarterly financial results, the expectation set by the individual railroads was that returning customers will help spur volume growth. Though 2020 is starting out slowly, most senior railroad executives and shipper logistics managers are talking about a possible recovery in the second half of the year. However, there is little statistical economic data published yet to support that optimistic outlook.