Maersk Line, the world’s largest container shipping company, is seeing a short-term rise in freight rates and an inflow of new clients after the collapse of Hanjin Shipping Co.
“There’s no doubt that we’re seeing a reaction in the rate market,” Klaus Rud Sejling, the executive in charge of Maersk Line’s east-west network, said in a telephone interview. “The question is: What will happen with the rates in the longer term? In the short term, the effect is positive, but there are many factors that can influence rates in the medium and in the long term.”
Hanjin, South Korea’s biggest container company with 97 ships, recently filed for bankruptcy protection in Seoul.
“What we’re hearing from the customers that are coming to us is that they are seeking a partner that’s stable,” Sejling said. “Customers are coming to us because we are financially strong.”
Maersk Line is part of the
Copenhagen-based conglomerate A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S, which also owns ports, drilling rigs and oil fields.
The rise in freight rates could boost Maersk Line’s net profit by as much as US$760 million for this year, SEB analyst Lars Heindorff said in a note on Thursday last week.
However, rate increases are unlikely to stick, so it is more likely that Maersk Line’s profit would be boosted by less than US$200 million, Heindorff said.
Maersk Line on Wednesday last week said that it will open a new service from Asia to the US west coast to soak up Hanjin’s customers.
Sejling said that the new capacity would add 0.6 percentage points to Maersk Line’s market share on the route, which is at about 7.5 percent.
“We are constantly optimizing our network and our port calls, but we don’t have any plans to add more services at this point,” Sejling said.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by