Our global freight forwarding network keeps our customers freight moving across the world.

Shippers join Cargo iQ performance measurement framework

Cargo iQ has expanded its pre-existing methodology to measure airfreight shipping performance by collaborating with the European Shippers' Council (ESC) to include shippers for the first time. Focusing on service responsibilities, visibility, and performance measurement, the framework sets out door-to-door business scenarios, delineating service scopes and responsibilities, including milestones for handing over cargo, documents, and data to support planning, exception management, and performance measurement. The collaboration will help shippers and freight forwarders use performance data to identify problems and take action to improve the transport process, Cargo iQ - an IATA interest group dedicated to creating and implementing performance management standards for the global air cargo industry - noted. The new framework came to fruition following a series of joint workshops held by Cargo iQ and ESC, a non-profit organisation representing cargo owners/shippers throughout Europe, that have been held since September last year. Moreover, the framework will be reviewed with a larger audience in the coming months and integrated into Cargo iQ's Master Operating Plan (MOP), an IATA-supported blueprint for the standardisation of air cargo processes. Incorporating shippers in the Cargo iQ framework broadens the well-established collaboration between freight forwarders, airlines, and ground handlers to take in cargo owners, ensuring that service performance measures reflect the needs of the airfreight supply chain's ultimate customer. Marie Seco-Köppen, executive director of Cargo iQ, commented: "Involving shippers more closely in Cargo iQ was long overdue. "It is essential to align on expectations and agree on common principles to ensure our performance standard evolves to become valuable for a broader audience." Godfried Smit, secretary general of the ESC, said that the initiative "marks an important step towards strengthening collaboration across the air cargo ecosystem, bringing together carriers, freight forwarders, ground handlers, and shippers. "In today's highly dynamic airfreight market, ensuring that goods reach their destinations efficiently and cost-effectively is essential. Supply chain visibility is a critical enabler of that ambition. "The Cargo iQ initiative plays a key role in establishing a strong benchmark for transparency, efficiency, and seamless collaboration across the industry."

Shippers eye transloading to ease truck constraints at US-Mexico border

Pressures at the US's southern border, from rising volumes and diminished trucking capacity, are causing shippers to evaluate transloading. According to Uber Freight, this is turning from an emergency solution into a structural network element. Uncertainty about the future of Mexico's free-trade agreement with the US has not made a dent in the rise of truck border crossings. Trade between the neighbours rose to $94.8bn in July, up 27.5% from a year earlier, and more than 70% of this crosses the border on trucks. While volume kept growing, capacity has been hit by US enforcement of trucking regulations, notably English language proficiency rules and cabotage restrictions. The pool of B1 drivers, who pick up freight in Mexico and deliver it to the US, has been reduced by 25,000 between April of last year and this month. The strain has been building: Uber Freight has counted three occasions this year so far when shippers, reliant on B1 drivers, "got stuck with backlogs of 30, 40, sometimes 50 loads, when that capacity wasn't there". All of these blockages occurred at the Laredo crossing, which handles about 40% of US-Mexico commercial traffic. Official numbers of daily crossings at the bottleneck vary between 17,000 and 21,000 trucks a day. CANACAR, Mexico's national trucking association, has acknowledged the importance of combating illegal cabotage, but warned of operational challenges for Mexican operators, and additional delays at the border due to increased inspections and documentation requirements that complicate driver scheduling, equipment positioning, and delivery times. Washington appears unlikely to ease its enforcement drive on the trucking industry. Logistics providers like CH Robinson have warned customers that cross-border capacity could tighten further this quarter. The driver shortage is not a temporary setback but a structural issue, said Kyle Toombs, SVP of capacity solutions at Uber Freight. "Some of these drivers may requalify over time, but losing a visa is hard to come back from, and in the meantime that capacity isn't paused, it's gone," he commented. On top of the driver shortage, rising operating costs, higher interest rates, and tighter lending conditions are discouraging new trucking companies from entering the market. Now, the disparity between capacity and volume is causing a growing number of cargo owners to look at transloading as a strategic measure to limit the impact of border disruptions and driver shortages, Mr Toombs reported. Historically the concept has been viewed as a stopgap measure used by smaller shippers, but it is now getting attention from larger firms as well, including industries like automotive and electronics that eschewed transloading. Mr Toombs said: "A lot of large, middle-market enterprise-type companies are now looking at it." And the concept itself is being viewed in a new light, he added. "Over the past year, transloading has shifted from an emergency workaround into something shippers deliberately design into their networks from day one. It isn't a reaction to a rough patch. It's a structural response to a labour pool that isn't coming back the way it was," he said. Transloading serves as a pressure valve to deal with disruptions to cross-border flows, tapping into a larger pool of drivers, but it can be elevated to become a plank in a shipper's transport strategy. "If a product can transload, it can also run through trailer. That means transloading isn't a trade-off against existing through-trailer capacity; it's incremental volume added on top of it. The shippers getting this right aren't treating it as either-or. They're building both capabilities, putting the right controls around the warehouses and cross docks they use to protect product integrity, and making the cost-versus-service call lane by lane. Often, they don't have to choose at all," Mr Toombs explained. According to him, capacity for transloading is "fairly sufficient", as it does not require much warehouse capacity and there is an ample labour pool available. The cost differential between transloading and end-do-end trucking fluctuates, but on balance through-trailer cost is "a bit higher", he said, adding that transloading charge at the border is about $150-$200. Companies that want to build up a transloading leg should start out by mapping their network lane by lane, tracking the regulatory signals, and building the necessary relationships and warehouse controls, he advised. "Make sure your customs broker is looped in and that you use C-TPAT-certified carriers," he added. In terms of mixing transloading with through-trailer use, Mr Toombs recommended "at least 10-15% of total volume" to the former. " You can increase this if, and when, you want," he said. While most transloading is happening at Laredo, firms are also using other border points like El Paso, and a growing number are using more than one location for transloading, he noted.

'Redeployment and agility' key to continued success of LNG transition, says CMA

CMA CGM's decision to be an early mover in LNG bunkering, amid the decarbonisation push, has paid dividends, according to the French carrier's VP for bunkering and energy transition, Farid Trad. At last week's Singapore International Bunkering Conference and Exhibition (SIBCON), he recalled that In 2017, CMA CGM signed the first of a few 10-year agreements under which compatriot energy major TotalEnergies supplied 300,000 tons of LNG annually to the carrier in Rotterdam. Deliveries commenced in 2020, using an LNG bunkering vessel commissioned by Mitsui OSK Lines for long-term charter to TotalEnergies. Mr Trad said: "When you look at what is happening 10 years later, you can't help but say what we have achieved is enormous. We went through the Ukraine crisis in 2022 after Covid, and now we have another geopolitical event in the Middle East. What's certain is that any future strategy will be a combination of security of supply, decarbonisation, and competitiveness. Finding the holy grail will be around those three dimensions." In July 2025, CMA CGM and TotalEnergies announced a new 50:50 joint-venture for LNG bunkering logistics in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp region, expanding their long-term cooperation and scaling supply up to 360,000 tons annually through 2040. In conjunction with SIBCON, CMA CGM announced it would work with Singapore LNG Corp, which operates the LNG terminals, and the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, to develop liquefied bio-methane as a marine fuel at the world's largest bunkering port by sales volumes. By going upstream and operating its own LNG bunkering barges, Mr Trad said, the French shipping line was assured of fuel for its LNG dual-fuelled ships. CMA CGM, the third-largest shipping line with a fleet of nearly 4.5m teu, has 157 containerships of 1.6m teu on order, all to run on LNG dual-fuel. Explaining CMA CGM's choice of LNG, Mr Trad said the gas reduced health hazards due to lower sulphur oxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. Alluding to uncertainty in environmental regulations, he added: "To invest in the long run, we need some certainty on regulation, which is lacking today. Discussions are still ongoing at IMO. We are still waiting to see how it will all fit together. "When we order a ship, we order it for 25 years. So we always need to have a longer view on where we're standing and you have to go through different crises, ups and downs, [fuel] prices could be up, prices could be down." He said CMA CGM saw agility and pre-deployment as key success factors, given the repeated supply chain shocks since 2020. "The key critical point is not the potential demand, but the ability of the network of LNG bunker barges to be wherever we require them in terms of agility. "One of the key things is that redeployment and agility is one of the key factors to managing the container shipping fleet. So we need to be able to change trading patterns as quickly as possible. And for that, we need bunker barges to be available in all ports when we possibly need them. Not only in huge bunker hubs like Rotterdam, Shanghai, and Singapore, but there are other ports that are either secondary or less important."