Trading Concept
  • Home
  • Trading News
  • Email Whitelisting
  • Privacy Policy
  • Home
  • Trading News
  • Email Whitelisting
  • Privacy Policy
No Result
View All Result
Trading Concept
No Result
View All Result
Home Trading News

How Amazon beats supply chain chaos with its own containers, chartered ships and long-haul planes

by
December 4, 2021
in Trading News
0
0
SHARES
0
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

RELATED POSTS

Sam Altman didn’t take any equity in OpenAI, report says

‘It was agony’: Why SVB’s collapse is especially hard as a Black founder, says CEO

For years, Amazon has been quietly chartering private cargo ships, making its own containers, and leasing planes to better control the complicated shipping journey of an online order. Now, as many retailers panic over supply chain chaos, Amazon’s costly early moves are helping it avoid the long wait times for available dock space and workers at the country’s busiest ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

“Los Angeles, there’s 79 vessels sitting out there up to 45 days waiting to come into the harbor,” ocean freight analyst Steve Ferreira told CNBC in November. “Amazon’s latest venture that I’ve been tracking in the last two days, it waited two days in the harbor.”

By chartering private cargo vessels to carry its goods, Amazon can control where its goods go, avoiding the most congested ports.

“Who else would think of putting something going into an obscure port in Washington, and then trucking it down to L.A.? Most people are thinking, well, just bring the ship into L.A. But then you’re experiencing those two-week and three-weeks delay. So Amazon’s really taken advantage of some of the niche strategies I believe that the market needs to employ,” Ferreira said.

Still, Amazon has seen a 14% rise in out-of-stock items and an average price increase of 25% since January 2021, according to e-commerce management platform CommerceIQ.

“The consumer has been feeling price increases in everything that they’re purchasing,” said Margaret Kidd, Supply Chain & Logistics Technology program director at the University of Houston. “Ultimately, when there’s an increase in the cost of transportation, it gets passed down to the consumer.”

Amazon has been on a spending spree to control as much of the shipping process as possible. It spent more than $61 billion on shipping in 2020, up from just under $38 billion in 2019. Now, Amazon is shipping 72% of its own packages, up from less than 47% in 2019 according to SJ Consulting Group.

It’s even taking control at the first step of the shipping journey by making its own 53-foot cargo containers in China. Containers are in short supply, with long wait times and prices surging from less than $2,000 before the pandemic to $20,000 today.

“Amazon has produced probably 5,000 to 10,000 of these containers over the last two years I’ve been tracking it,” Ferreira said. “When they bring these containers onto U.S. soil, once they unload them, guess what? They get to be used in the domestic system and the rail system. They don’t have to return them to Asia like everyone else does.”

A cargo vessel called the Star Lygra called at the Port of Houston on October 5, 2021, filled with Amazon containers.

Amazon containers are arrive at the Port of Houston on the Star Lygra cargo vessel on October 5, 2021

Port Houston

“By creating their own containers, they are essentially guaranteeing that equipment is going to be available for them,” said Lauren Beagen, maritime lawyer and founder of Squall Strategies. She was working at the Federal Maritime Commission when Amazon first registered with the agency in 2015, the first indication it was exploring its own ocean freight business.

Then in 2017, Amazon started quietly operating as a global freight forwarder through a Chinese subsidiary, helping move goods across the ocean for its Chinese sellers who pay to be part of the Fulfilled by Amazon program. Internally, Amazon dubbed this project “Dragon Boat.”

“They are doing over 10,000 containers per month of the small- and medium-sized Chinese exporters. Amazon’s volume as an ocean vendor — that’s right, you heard me correct, they’re considered an ocean vendor — would rank them in the top five transportation companies in the Trans Pacific,” Ferreira said.

This season, a handful of other major retailers — Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Ikea and Target — are also chartering their own vessels to bypass the busiest ports and get their goods unloaded sooner.

“The real purpose of these vessels when they were built was not containers. It was really lumber, chemicals, grain, agricultural products. But because of the ingenuity and creativity and lack of space, Amazon and many other smart people have quickly figured out how to convert some of these multipurpose vessels to container,” Ferreira said.

For some of the highest-margin goods, Amazon is avoiding ports altogether by reportedly leasing at least ten long-haul planes that can get smaller amounts of cargo directly from China to the U.S. much faster. One of the converted Boeing 777 planes can carry 220,000 pounds of cargo. According to capacity estimates from Ocean Audit, the small 1,000-container freighters being chartered by Amazon and others can hold 180 times that, with the biggest cargo ships carrying more than 3,600 times what the planes can hold.

Another strain on the supply chain is manpower.

“We’ve been hearing a lot about the great resignation, with a lot of jobs going open and unfilled. So I think companies are looking to get very creative in attracting labor. It might be signing bonuses, higher pay,” said Judy Whipple, supply chain management professor at Michigan State University.

To fight the worker shortage — and a reputation for relentless workload and breakneck speed — Amazon says it’s offering sign-on bonuses of up to $3,000 to all the 150,000 seasonal workers it’s hiring this year. Last year, it hired 100,000 seasonal workers.

“That 50,000 increase in employees this year over last year is probably people to do the unloads. They’ve got these containers coming in at the last second, man, they want to unload those goods and get them on the shelves in the fulfillment centers as quickly as possible,” said John Esborn, who used to run logistics operations for Wayfair and is now the head of international transportation for Amazon aggregator Perch.

The seasonal workers are unloading and loading, picking and packing at more than 250 new facilities Amazon says it’s opened in the U.S. just in 2021 — a clear indication that it planned far ahead for the final bottleneck in the supply chain backlog: warehouse capacity.

Watch the video to learn more about all the bold and costly ways Amazon is avoiding the worst of the supply chain crisis this holiday season.

ShareTweetPin

Related Posts

Sam Altman didn’t take any equity in OpenAI, report says

by
March 24, 2023
0

Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, pauses during the New Work Summit in Half Moon Bay, California, U.S., on Monday,...

‘It was agony’: Why SVB’s collapse is especially hard as a Black founder, says CEO

by
March 24, 2023
0

Isa Watson, founder of voice-only social messaging app Squad, was on a plane when she got the news: Silicon Valley...

Europe’s leaders battle banking crisis as market rout hangs over Brussels summit

by
March 24, 2023
0

In this article .BBKADBCSG.N-CH Follow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Deutsche Bank is profitable after...

BofA’s Hartnett sees commercial real estate as the ‘next shoe to drop’

by
March 24, 2023
0

Commercial real estate could be the next danger spot in the wobbly U.S. financial sector, according to Bank of America....

TikTok wants to distance itself from China — but Beijing is getting involved

by
March 24, 2023
0

China and U.S. flags are seen near a TikTok logo in this illustration picture taken July 16, 2020. Florence Lo...

Next Post

How to prepare your portfolio for a stock market crash

Saudi Arabian Airlines signs deal with CFM International worth $8.5 billion

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

email

Get the daily email about stock.

Please Enter Your Email Address:



By opting in you agree to our Privacy Policy. You also agree to receive emails from us and our affiliates. Remember that you can opt-out any time, we hate spam too!

MOST VIEWED

  • WHO says Covid vaccine booster programs will prolong pandemic

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Forget Tesla — this auto stock is the one to buy right now, analyst says

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Spin or Split? AT&T Has a Big Decision to Make on Discovery Stake.

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Here’s how Carl Icahn is positioning for a possible recession in America

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Some lawmakers and their families are betting thousands of dollars on crypto

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Home
  • Trading News
  • Email Whitelisting
  • Privacy Policy
All rights reserved by tradingconcept.net
No Result
View All Result
  • Email Whitelisting
  • Home
  • Privacy Policy

All rights reserved by www.tradingconcept.net