The international shipping industry has undergone significant changes in recent years, including changes driven by mergers and acquisitions, as well as impacts brought about by the application of Internet technology. Since 2014, when institutions began to focus on investing in the field of international shipping logistics, many startups have been working in this field, bringing substantial changes to the industry. These changes mainly include the following aspects:
Shipping companies have been merging one after another, resulting in the increasing size of the leading shipping companies and the concentration of shipping capacity. Representative examples include the merger of COSCO and China Shipping, Maersk's acquisition of Hamburg Süd, and the merger of three Japanese shipping companies into ONE. As the most important upstream supplier in the logistics chain, the trend of concentration of shipping companies will also have some impact on the Internet logistics platform model.
The emergence of multiple freight rate platforms has reduced the number of flyers that originally relied on information asymmetry, quickly compressed the offline supply chain levels, and also made the online transaction model that originally relied on deleting levels to bring low freight rates to end customers lose its foundation. The experience of many B2B industries shows that the online transaction model must at least bring 20-30% advantages over the offline transaction model in terms of cost or efficiency, otherwise it will be difficult to promote. The international shipping logistics industry also needs to explore other feasible models.
The industry's basic information integration, integration and openness are rapidly improving. Shanghai Port integrated the cargo information of Shanghai Port in March last year and opened it to the public; Ningbo Port's information integration was done earlier than Shanghai; and the nationwide truck positioning information was also integrated at the beginning of last year. The opening of business information of industry leaders such as terminals and large shipping companies plays a vital role in promoting transparency, standardization and efficiency improvement of the entire industry.
The rapid growth of labor costs and the difficulty of recruitment highlighted in the past two years have made the industry pay more and more attention to systematization and upstream and downstream interconnection. Just like Foxconn's large-scale promotion of automation to replace high reliance on manpower, the international shipping logistics industry will also face drastic changes brought about by systematization and intelligence in the future.
