Sea freight rates continue to increase, what has BIGLUX done?
With congestion in many major ports around the world, further disrupting the logistics supply chain, container liner schedules are experiencing extensive delays. Nowadays, the shipping industry is even more terrible than price hikes because of shipping delays.
The price for a container of goods from China to the U.S. West Coast and European ports has hovered near record highs for several months, and conditions are ripe for more increases even though spot rates usually soften this time of year. What’s more, new contracts being signed by some of the biggest U.S. importers indicate the spike won’t be a short-term blip. Higher Shipping Costs Are Here to Stay, Sparking Price Increases
Shipping prices have risen sharply! There are frequent cases of lack of containers and space. How should BIGLUX deal with it?
1. We have to keep in mind that " Plan B" is always necessary
Freight forwarders, shipping companies, ports, air transport, and charter flights require flexible and diverse transport combinations. It is not possible to use only one freight forwarder and only one shipping company, which means "don't hang on a tree."
The cargo mainly maintains the greatest flexibility, keeps in touch with some freight forwarders, and always pays attention to the latest market trends. Always pay attention to some plans to reach the destination faster, such as going to some less popular ports that do not need to queue up, arrange trucks directly from the port to the destination warehouse, and try to avoid using the railway plan.
If sea transportation is really too late, so it is immediately adjusted to the air transportation plan. Although the price is expensive, the timeliness of transportation is guaranteed. A small amount of air transportation can alleviate the urgent need and meet the production and order delivery. In short, no matter what scheme was used before, there must be an alternative plan now.
2. Keep everyone in communication
At critical moments, we must ensure normal communication across all channels, and even more active communication. Within the company, the objects of communication include but are not limited to sales, production, marketing, purchasing and other departments.
The supply chain must convey the true situation of the current maritime market within the company, so that everyone can understand the complexity and difficulty of our work. Although other departments can't help much, they are aware of the current difficult situation and can understand some of the reasons why the performance is not up to standard. In a word, long live understanding!
For external suppliers, it is necessary to ensure transportation capacity and cultivate good partnerships. In this situation, there are many friends and multiple paths, and you can't tell which day you still ask others to help you ship the goods. So the cargo owner put down Party A’s shelf and talked more with Party B about the situation. He might think of you even when he has a container space.
3. The way to support customer to save shipping cost
Due to the reason of heavy weight of our solar trailer tower, even the lightest version of our simple version HiSITE series mobile surveillance trailer, the weight would be 750KG/ unit; not mention to our professoional solar light tower with 8X455W solar panels, the gross weight has reach to 2000KG. so we have to choose sea freight mostly.
However, we can support customer to save freight cost by change the packing way. for example for our 6*455W and 3*455W solar light tower, we can split the whole trailer into some main parts to save the container loading space. Formerly, one 40' container can only 4units of solar light tower, but after we change package, each 40HQ can load 8 units. In this way, we have save a lot of cost for some large quantity requirement customers.
4. Keep upgrading stocking to save transaction time
At present, time is money, the earlier the customer get the products, the more the customer can earn. So we have been ready for stocking some hot-sale products for urgent sample order, for example: our professional "HiLIGHT" series 3*380W solar light tower and our simple version " HiSITE" series mobile CCTV tower.
HiLIGHT series solar light tower
HiSITE series solar CCTV trailer tower