Shipping Offers Difficult To Come By

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause delays in shipping while shipping costs continue to rise. What used to take mere hours to receive shipping offers now takes days and instead of having plentiful options, you may end up with only one or two.

Our very own Mark Murray had the opportunity to share his thoughts with the Wall Street Journal:

A few years ago we would get a half-dozen competitive freight offers from shipping companies within a couple of hours. Now it’s a couple of days to get an offer from one of the big boys, you have to pay crazy freight rates and your shipment is months late. Our hands are tied.

In the past, many smaller shipping companies existed. Now, the big players have acquired the little guys and decreased the competition. In conjunction with the COVID-19 pandemic, demand has increased. With decreased competition and increased demand, prices have skyrocketed and timing has been pushed considerably.

Mr. Murray of DeSales said a shipment from Malaysia that was supposed to leave June 26 got bumped back to July 7. Then a COVID-19 outbreak delayed sailing to early September with an estimated arrival date in early October.

DeSales paid $9,500 to book the container, up from around $3,000 before the pandemic, Mr. Murray said. It got the price after negotiating with a number of freight forwarders, who had originally asked to be paid around $19,000.

Experts in the shipping space are expecting the shipping effects of the pandemic to linger for at least 18 more months, leading to a tripling of the shipping profit margin year over year. And per-container pricing has increased as much as 600% over the last year.

Even with these unprecedented raises in prices, here at DeSales Trading Company, we are committed to deliver competitive prices on all of our products.

To find out what we do have in stock, please see our Yarn Hot Sheet.


Source: portions of this post were quoted from the Wall Street Journal’s article titled Shipping Options Dry Up as Businesses Try to Rebuild From Pandemic

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