Another round of staff lay-offs at Flexport - The Loadstar

Flexport is cutting staff again, according to The Information. In a memo to staff, CEO Ryan Petersen acknowledged that the company would have to "move faster" to hits its profitability goals. Cuts will focus on management and the fulfilment team, but it is not yet clear how many job losses there will be. The plan, reportedly, is to focus fulfilment on big customers rather than SMEs, which have been the company's focus in recent years. The memo noted: "These changes will increase our velocity in that direction, and set us up for a successful next few years of profitable growth." It is the second round of job cuts this year at the forwarder, after some 20% of roles were slashed in January. The Information also noted that Flexport was looking to sublease warehouse space in a bid to cut costs.

Near-$500m sale-leaseback deal: Sweden's Catena buys largest logistics centre in Denmark from DSV - The Loadstar

Swedish property firm Catena has signed an agreement with DSV Road Holding A/S to acquire a property in Horsens, Denmark, valued at about Dkr3.3bn ($490m). "During 2024, Catena acquired the Örja 1:22 property in Landskrona and the Tornbornahögenly built logistics space," it said. Catena added in a press release yesterday, 30 September, that the tenant in the newly built logistics facilities is a subsidiary of DSV Group and the acquisition is taking place as a corporate transaction, with an "underlying property value of approximately DKK 3.3 billion and is taking the form of a sale-leaseback transaction". Moreover, it noted: "The purchase price for the shares amounts to approximately Dkr698 million after deduction of deferred taxes and the acquisition is financed with own funds and external credit. DSV Road A/S is signing a 14-year lease in connection with the transaction. The property in question, Mossvej 27-29, is located in a well-established logistics area in, very well connected to E45 being one of the two most important highways in Denmark. The site area is around 705,565 m2 and the lettable area is approximately 315,000 m2. The facility is not only the largest logistics centre in Denmark, but also one of the largest logistics sites in Europe. The property will be certified to DGNB, whereas the warehouse will certify for DGNB Silver and the office for DGNB Gold. The roofs features large solar cell plants installed by the seller with a total capacity of 35 MWp annually. This, combined with other energy solutions, makes the entire facility self-sufficient."

My recipe for success: how Gemini can win the alliance race - The Loadstar

The Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd sales reps will be out in the field in force over the coming months, visiting their key account customers ahead of the transition to the Gemini Cooperation alliance early next year. The importance of these face-to-face contacts cannot be over emphasised: shippers remain sceptical about the hub-and-spoke transhipment concept of the new vessel-sharing agreement (VSA) and will want to be reassured that the Gemini partners have all their operational ducks (ships and hub & spoke ports) in a row from day one. It goes without saying that the carriers' key account reps will need to bring their a-game into play for these meetings and be confident of their product. It's an enormous challenge, but also represents a great opportunity and, if handled correctly, could see Gemini set a new, higher bar for schedule integrity and represent a long-overdue game-change for liner shipping. In my 30-plus years in the liner industry I don't think I ever heard a shipper say they preferred transhipment to a direct call; so how can the new Gemini partners convince shippers that their transhipment concept will actually work in practice, let alone achieve their ambitious target of 90% schedule reliability? Moreover, the members of the Ocean and THE (soon to be dubbed Premier) alliances, as well as the outgoing 2M partner, to be standalone carrier, MSC, are understandably selling their 'direct' connections to those same customers. It follows that we are entering a critical period for the Maersk and Hapag commercial teams, as they try to progress early east-west contract negotiations with their customers. In the main, Gemini intends to deploy large shuttle vessels to and from their nominated hub ports, but to all intents and purposes these are glorified feeder vessels, and for many shippers there's the rub: feeder services are inherently prone to delays, mostly from events outside the operator's control. How do I know this? As a feeder operator in a past life, I spent many hours pleading with ports to allow my ship onto a berth and be allocated a crane, in order to make export connections and/or load urgently awaited import boxes, despite the fact that often the export connections were for a ship that was currently under load. Unfortunately, it's a fact of life that ports prefer to handle bigger ships, which give them less hassle and more revenue per crane hour; furthermore, their largest direct-calling customers always demand and get top priority, be it for berthing or crane allocation. Indeed, transhipment nightmares for clients are nervously recalled by forwarders and NVOCCs, as a consequence of missed connections, split shipments, boxes stranded on the wrong terminal, or feeders weather-delayed or held off the port as mother vessels are given priority. So what should Maersk and Hapag's reps be saying to their customers that could help reassure them? Schedule reliability combined with better communication could be the recipe for Gemini success Notwithstanding the huge advances in technology in container liner shipping over the past 10 years, schedule reliability has plunged to all-time lows, with communication from carriers woefully poor. If the Gemini carriers can achieve their ambitious schedule reliability goals and at the same time improve communication, I believe they could be onto a winner.