Ocean Freight Comments
Transportation and Export Report: Jay O’Neil, O’Neil Commodity Consulting: You can call this a down week or maybe an adjustment week, but any way you look at it world Dry-Bulk ocean freight indices and physical rates were lower. In fact, rates declined each day of this week and took back most of the market gains of the last two weeks.
The North American fall harvest has not yet gained enough momentum to create a big enough demand to help hold the market up. We have seen Chinese vessels showing up for new crop U.S. soybeans in the Gulf, but there isn’t much to put in them yet. Only a few such cargoes have been loaded and so the market anxiously awaits what it hopes will be better farmer selling and more cargo demand in the coming weeks.
Below is a recent history of freight values for Capesize vessels of iron ore from Western Australia to China:
The charts below represent January-December 2013 annual totals versus year-to-date 2014 container shipments to Malaysia.
