March Madness is over and you thought you were done with brackets. Wrong. As wrong as my NCAA bracket. To give you a carrier alliance overview, here comes the 2014 Carrier Craziness Bracket!

Carrier alliances, like the P3 Network, G6 Alliance, and CKYH Alliance, are narrowing competition in the international shipping field. Showing the alliances in bracket form makes it easy to see just how the competition is shaping up.

Carrier Craziness Bracket resized 600

For those of you who like hard data, Drewery has done an excellent job of compiling information on what the 3 big alliances look like in terms of ship deployment, sailings, market percentage by capacity, and so on.

Below are tables from that data to help us get a look at how things are now and get a peek at what the international shipping waters will look like later this year when the alliances’ latest plans are supposed to be in full implementation.

P3 Network

Beginning of Year & Post Implentation:

P3 Alliance Jan. 2014

P3 Alliance post implementation

G6 Alliance

Beginning of Year & Post Implentation:

G6 Alliance Jan. 2014

G6 Alliance post implementation

CKYH Alliance

Beginning of Year & Mid 2014:

CKYH Alliance Jan. 2014

CKYH Alliance (mid 2014)

As new megaships hitting the water over 2014 and 2015 combine with carrier alliances trying to control capacity, shippers can expect spot freight rates to remain volatile and GRIs from the carriers to be a constant.

As price focused as we all tend to be with our international shipping, freight rate pricing may not be the most important place for shippers to look as these alliances reach full implementation.

Service is the key to the carrier alliance situation for shippers. Carriers have been promulgating the message that combining their ships and other capacity & operations resources will benefit shippers in terms of service.

However, Drewery says “missed sailings will be a major capacity management tool” for carriers. Could this be a negative service sign for shippers? It hardly sounds like good service for shippers.

On the other hand, resources of alliance member carriers working together should be able to create smoother and more efficient cargo movement and the “missed sailings” could simply be due to cargo combining on less ships, allowing unecessary sailings to be cancelled without delaying cargo shipping.

What we know for certain is that carrier alliances are moving forward into the future of international shipping.

We’ve been discussing carrier alliances and their effects on international shipping competition in our blog at great length.

You can go beyond this carrier alliance overview by going through our posts on the subject below which also include the Hapag-Lloyd, CSAV merging, and the carrier cargo pricing collusion investigation. A list of related posts are below.

In the meantime, we’re always ready to give you the best service possible and offer free freight rate pricing.

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