From the President’s Desk
Rick Lindemann

Greetings All:

Spring is here, business is booming, life is good, smooth sailing, right?  Not necessarily.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you can’t help but experience the new challenges that come with the increase in business. We all get price increase notifications from our suppliers, struggle with long lead-times and late deliveries, and so on and so on.

I’ve put together a collection of information that I have received over the last several weeks Hopefully the information is helpful to understand the situation and prepare you to better explain it to your customers. As far as what to do about it?

Here are a few things that we are doing to cope with what’s happening:

  • Pass on price increases as soon as you get them, huge profit loss if your cost goes up but your sell price does not.
  • Manage your inventory, buy ahead of a price increase if you can, cautiously analyze what you carry, and stock up if necessary, to ride out supply chain shortages. After all, he who has the inventory gets the sale.
  • Scour the surplus inventory lists. Many companies are carrying overstock that they would be thrilled to get rid of.
  • Study your freight charges. Freight costs are going up drastically for various reasons. In one instance we found there was an over-length charge for shipping a 19-foot piece of material. Because the packaging made it 21 feet, there was a 40% increase in the shipping charge.

These are just a few things we try to do to manage expense and profitability. If you have others, please share.

Best Regards,
Rick Lindemann

 

Some information to continue to keep everyone aware of the issues and it’s not changing.

Key Notes:

  • The Impact of the Suez Canal Incident coupled with the industry wide congestion issues has now been assessed to have caused a 24% reduction in overall capacity into the East Coast and 8% into the West Coast on the Maersk network since the start of the year.
  • US Imports from Asia across the industry accelerated in March, jumping 22% from February for a total of 1.66 Million TEU. This is also up a staggering 90.5% from the same month a year ago. According to IHS Markit PIERS, March was the second busiest month in the history of the Transpacific trade, surpassed only by the 2020 Peak season month of October.
  • Ports of Vancouver and Seattle are now operating at 120% of yard capacity, with average vessel wait times at 7 days and 4 days respectively. In Vancouver containers are only being discharged off vessels when other on-terminal containers exit the gates due to limited terminal capacity.
  • Ports in Los Angeles and Oakland remain strained mainly due to labor constraints. There are on average 20-25 vessels at anchor in Long Beach with an 8-11 day wait time and an average of 15-20 vessels at anchor in Oakland with a 10-15 day wait time at any given point.
  • Chassis Availability is beginning to normalize as we continue to work with our providers to ensure availability across the network. The average chassis dwell time in most of our locations has eased with only Savannah, Memphis and Chicago remaining slightly elevated.
  • Rail Networks in the Pacific North West and South West are stretched. Import container dwell times also continue to rise due to trucking capacity shortages across many Mid-West inland rail ramps with yard space all but depleted.