Page 4 - Al-Rashed Newsletter January 2022

SHIPPING WORLD
DID YOU KNOW?
A hippopotamus can run faster than Alphaliner data published this week shows 43.7% of the total box
a man.
The world’s oldest existing eatery
opened in Kai-Feng, China in 1153.
The average age of Forbes’s 400
wealthiest individuals is 63.
MSC and Lufthansa in joint bid to take over Italy's new ITA
Airways
MSC has told the Italian government it wants to buy a stake in the
new airline, ITA Airways, which began operations in October,
replacing defunct Alitalia.
And it’s doing it in partnership with Lufthansa.
As previously reported, Lufthansa has expressed an interest in
wrestling state-owned ITA away from the SkyTeam Alliance to add it
to its own roster of carriers, which include Austrian, Swiss and
Brussels.
Now you can rent a robot worker – cheaper than paying a human
The economics of automating warehouse operations are becoming
increasingly plain – in the US, the minimum wage for a worker is $15
an hour, while leasing a robot (as opposed to purchasing one for
around $100,000) comes in at around $8 an hour.
This feature from Wired explains how the pandemic-induced labour
shortages in production and distribution facilities led to the
emergence of a new breed of leasing companies building up fleets of
robots and renting them out – a particular attraction for smaller
operators nervous of the large capex requirements of directly
investing in automation.
Shipping lines are paying workers bonuses of more than three
years’ salary
Several of the world’s largest shipping lines, worried they will be
unable to recruit and retain workers, have begun offering
unprecedented incentives for a job known for notoriously bad working
conditions and low pay. To dissuade seafarers from leaving their
jobs, global shipping lines are doling out massive bonuses that will
effectively triple or quadruple some workers’ salaries for the year in
hopes of retaining workers to staff many of the ships they’ve bought
or ordered during the pandemic.
Intra-Asia and Africa trades lose out in today’s record-breaking
box shipping era
Container services covering the intra-Asia and Africa markets have
been ditched in dramatic fashion over the past year as global liners
focus on the two main east-west tradelanes.
fleet is now trading on the transpacific and Asia-Europe, the two
biggest east-west trades, up from 38.1% year-on-year.
At the start of this year, 22% of the total cellular fleet was deployed
between Asia and North America, up from 17.5% on January 1 2021.
Carriers added 1.3m teu of capacity onto the transpacific, a
“staggering” 31.2% increase, Alphaliner reported in its latest weekly
report.
Source: www.splash247.com, www.loadstar.com