Source : www.maritime-executive.com / www.joc.com
Hanjin Shipping shares surged as much as 28 percent in morning trade on Thursday after the board of Korean Air Lines, its biggest shareholder, approved lending 60 billion won ($53.96 million) to the troubled container carrier.
Shares of Korean Air climbed five percent.
Korean Air's board decided late on Wednesday to provide the funds to help offload cargo that has been stranded on Hanjin ships, using Hanjin's accounts receivable as collateral, a spokesman for the airline said.
The money will be used to help unload cargo that has been stranded since the world's seventh-largest container carrier collapsed late last month.
The airline's loan is in addition to 40 billion won provided by the Hanjin Group's chairman, but the total is still short of the 173 billion won Hanjin estimated in a court submission this month that it needed to unload all cargo.
In addition to having container ships waiting in international waters unable to unload, the situation has struck another issue with the shortage of chassis. Hanjin’s failure has once again exposed how fragile the new chassis regime is in the US, demonstrating that shipping lines, intermodal equipment providers, beneficial cargo owners and truckers still haven’t adjusted to a development that began several years ago when the lines began to shed their chassis holdings.
The latest twist has left thousands of empty Hanjin containers sitting on chassis across the country, taking the chassis out of service when they are needed most, the peak-shipping season. “Something has to be done or there will be a crisis,” said Ed DeNike, chief operating officer at SSA Marine, which operates container terminals in Long Beach, Oakland and Seattle.
Shipping lines, which had provided customers in the US with chassis and containers as a single unit since the beginning of containerization 50 years ago, signaled their intention to shed these costly assets in 2009 when Maersk Line transferred its chassis to Direct ChassisLink, which later was sold. Most container lines over the next few years sold their chassis to equipment-leasing companies, initially at smaller ports and inland locations.
Problems began to surface in July in Los Angeles-Long Beach when some of the 13 container terminal operators reported chassis shortages. Now many of the terminals in the largest US port complex report shortages. In a presentation Wednesday to the Propeller Club of Southern California, Don Peltier, operations director at DCLI, said he would use the word “dislocations,” because there are sufficient chassis in the region even with peak-season cargo volumes on the rise.
The problem, Peltier said, is that there are pockets of surplus and deficit chassis throughout the harbor that require continuous repositioning. The equipment providers are on top of the problem and are doing their best to reposition chassis from where they are not needed to where they are needed, he said.
Also, there are hundreds of chassis with loaded containers scattered at warehouses throughout the region because BCOs feel no pressure to quickly unload the containers. He suggested that the shipping lines may want to review their policies of giving BCOs a number of days to hold onto chassis without having to pay late-return charges known as per-diem fees.
We will continue to monitor the situation and keep you posted.
|
|
