There appears to be a red horizon in view over the container transport industry of the United States according to the recently released Global Port Tracker report by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Hackett Associates. The Global Port Tracker is meant to be relevant for container transport ports on both the east, west and gulf coast of America, including Oakland, Long Beach, Houston, Hampton Roads, Charleston and others. The newest Global Port Tracker is a business forecast of the next six months at eleven major US container transport ports, but it might be expanded to include ports on the east and west coast of Canada in the future. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising for this kind of service to be expanded in the future to include the major ports of the world. The information could create another market that would employ people and actually be useful to the freight industry as a tool to help make business and expected profits more predictable.
The report expects that due to increases in freight volumes during January and excellent forecasts for volume increases in the month that has always been the slowest year to year, February. Expectations of the report are that freight volumes during the first six months of 2010 are going to continue to go up as much as twenty five percent from the volumes experienced in 2009. This is great news for an industry that is looking for anything to give them hope for an improvement in business in 2010. The century of the environment has hit business pretty hard, so far, but humans and the freight industry are starting to get an idea of what we need to do to get business and life back on track.
Hopefully, the report’s assessment under estimates the increase in the numbers that are predicted and the first six months of the year are even better than expected. We need to try to get the freight industry back to where it was before the recession, if possible, and then try to keep driving down the road to improving the industry for all. We have been distracted from this task during the past twenty months by the problems in the industry, but if things start to look better we can get back to this task.
http://www.ifw-net.com/freightpubs/ifw/ind…tid=20017749646
http://www.globalporttracker.com/home.html
Tags: container transport, freight, freight forwarders, freight moving, freight shipping, freight transport, heavy haul, moving freight, shipping freight, trucking companies, trucking services, Trucking transport