Ocean Freight Comments
Transportation and Export Report: Jay O’Neil, O’Neil Commodity Consulting: In the world of ocean freight, what goes up must come back down. The basic fundamentals remain unchanged. It appears the market rally of the previous two weeks has come to an end and that things are cooling off again. The Capsize vessel market has not moved enough to notice over the past three weeks and past support in the Panamax sector seems to be wavering. It is only the smaller vessel segments (Supramax and Handymax) that are holding onto past gains. I’ve left rates unchanged for the week as we monitor how things track going into the weekend.
It looks like we exported some U.S. ethanol from Houston, TX to India at a freight rate of $85.00/MT. I don’t believe that U.S. west coast product would be competitive, but for the record that freight spread looks to be close to $10.00/MT.
Below is a recent history of freight values for Capesize vessels of iron ore from Western Australia to China:
The charts below represent year-to-date 2016 versus January-December 2015 annual totals for container shipments to Taiwan.
