Most of our Chinese customers are back at work according to emails we received last week. Right when the coronavirus has hit Europe, China slowly seems to finally gain more control of the situation. What happened? For the first time, there is almost no container equipment in Europe and Northern America due to the carriers blank sailings. They want to be ready in China, waiting for the economy to go up again. Alphaliner estimates that about 60 percent of the Asia-Europe sailings have been withdrawn. Now as the virus gets worse in Europe and the US, equipment turnaround speed puts…
Author: Florian Frese
Would you ever search for “accommodation in Barcelona” on Google or ask strangers on Facebook for a place to stay when you take your wife on a weekend trip to the beautiful city of Barcelona? Of course, you won’t do that because how can you trust some one that you have never seen before? To make a long story short: this is why Airbnb exists! They make it easy to rent a private room, ensure a high level of trust, guarantee payments and show ratings, reviews and pictures of the flat you’re about to rent. While people find it easy…
Who is reliable enough to trust with my assets? This was the main question of people after my keynote about “How to take the risk out of container logistics” at the Intermodal Europe in Hamburg. Trust is basically the most important ingredient when doing business with a partner: Will they return my containers on time? Do I have to follow up on my invoices? Can I easily reach my partner when I have questions? Without a certain level of trust, you would probably not make deals with a company, even though the offered price seems cheap. Over the last decades…
Logistics marketplaces are taking highly specialized areas by storm. With Container xChange, we’re building the first online platform for container logistics – more than 300 companies already find SOC Containers and identify partners on our marketplace. In this article, we share the challenges we face as a logistics marketplace and explain how we try to overcome them. Chicken-and-egg problem In the realm of marketplaces, the concomitant chicken-and-egg problem is inevitable. Demand from container suppliers on the platform drives users to join, but if there are no suppliers to begin with, where would the users come from? With xChange, we focused…