Mark Chadwick, President of the Global Shippers' Association, on the more than $100 million in tariff duty refunds still owed to shippers, and the labour-intensive process of tracking it all down. FBC clip, from the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club. Thanks to Dimerco Express Group (https://dimerco.com/) for supporting independent journalism. #ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub #OceanFreight #Logistics #Tariffs #GlobalTrade

#AirCargo #FreightBuyersClub #SupplyChain Peter Kerins, CEO of Magna Aviation, joins the Freight Buyers' Club to talk through where air cargo stands right now. He covers the capacity that's had to find a new home after the drop in China-EU volumes, whether Europe can absorb the cost the way the US market eventually did, and what the EU's July 1st change to low-value parcel rules has actually meant for e-commerce shippers so far. He also runs through Magna's current network, Asia into Europe, a strong Africa operation moving fresh produce out of Nairobi, five weekly US services and some ad hoc Latam flying, and where he's looking to add scheduled capacity next in Southeast Asia and South America. His peak season forecast isn't the one you'd expect either: no traditional surge, but ad hoc October bookings already running well ahead of where they'd normally sit in August.

#SupplyChain #Excel Pawan Joshi (Chief Strategy Officer, e2open) on the real reason Excel is holding supply chains back. It's not that the data isn't in the system. People still download it into Excel because that's how they're used to processing it, their own individual way of thinking. But Pawan argues the real unlock only happens once you get people out of Excel altogether. That's when they can actually spend their time on resiliency, contingency planning and thinking through scenarios, instead of just wrangling spreadsheets. Watch the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club for more on agentic AI and supply chain resilience. 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/02w9yX4sBOdZoemIOMX5iS 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agentic-ai-and-supply-chain-resilience-with-e2opens/id1668766055?i=1000788666152 🌐 Website: https://www.thefreightbuyersclub.com/podcast/agentic-ai-and-supply-chain-resilience-with-e2opens-pawan-joshi-northeasterns-nada-sanders-and-andre-simha-ex-msc/ ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQXnp7cbnJk

Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc says a lack of port investment is behind the congestion hitting shippers this year. Drewry's Eleanor Hadland isn't so sure. From 2010 to 2025, the industry added well over half a billion TEU of capacity, while container volumes only grew by 480 million TEU over the same period. By her numbers, capacity has grown faster than demand, not slower. Eleanor leads ports and terminals research at Drewry. Her full response is on the new episode of The Freight Buyers' Club, out now on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or at thefreightbuyersclub.com. Produced with the support of Dimerco Express Group, https://dimerco.com. #PortCongestion #ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub #Logistics

#AgenticAI #SupplyChain Nada Sanders, Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University and author of The Human/Machine, has spent decades studying how businesses forecast risk, and years serving as an expert witness in cases involving AI vendors. In this clip she explains what that experience has taught her, and it isn't flattering to the industry. Her clearest warning is about hidden costs. She says she can "almost guarantee" that any company buying an AI package will hit costs it didn't see coming, sometimes for things as basic as querying the algorithm a different way. Before that, she lays out concrete practices for moving from reacting to risk to actually anticipating it. That means looking past transactional data like past orders and shipments, which only tell you what already happened, and tracking external signals instead, supplier behaviour, port congestion, weather, geopolitical events. It means building a handful of plausible future scenarios rather than betting on one forecast. And it means predefining trigger points in advance, so that when lead times jump or a supplier's reliability drops past a set threshold, the response is automatic rather than argued over after the fact. She also walks through what her book's central argument, that this was never a contest between humans and machines, looks like in practice. At Unilever, AI handles high volume, early stage hiring screens while humans keep the final call. At Maersk and Amazon, AI tracks far more shipments, demand shifts and supplier issues than any person could process, flags anomalies and possible bottlenecks, then hands the decision, reroute or don't, to the human who understands the customer relationship. The harder question, she says, is what changes with agentic AI, where the system doesn't just recommend, it acts. That means deciding in advance where humans still need to check in, what level of uncertainty is acceptable before escalating to a person, and just as importantly, when the AI should stop acting altogether. Watch the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club for more from Nada Sanders, alongside Andre Simha (former digital transformation chief at MSC) and Pawan Joshi (Chief Strategy Officer, e2open), on forecasting, resilience and the future of human and AI collaboration in supply chains.

#AirCargo #Swissport #ECommerce Swissport’s global cargo chief Steven Polmans joins The Freight Buyers’ Club at the EU Cross-Border E-Commerce Forum 2026 in Liège to discuss air cargo growth, changing e-commerce flows and the outlook for global freight markets. Polmans explains Swissport’s growth strategy across the United States, Europe, China and wider Asia, while also identifying more targeted opportunities in Africa and Latin America. He discusses the potential role of mergers and acquisitions, organic expansion and joint ventures as Swissport looks to expand its cargo business. The interview also examines the impact of Europe’s new e-commerce regulations and fees, and compares the region’s changing low-value e-commerce market with the experience in the United States. Despite the decline in e-commerce shipments, Polmans says overall air cargo volumes have remained more resilient, with a shift towards more consolidated freight. He also highlights growth in new commodities and increased cargo volumes from Africa, while discussing the ability of air cargo to respond quickly to market disruption. Looking ahead, Polmans addresses the major issues facing the sector through the rest of 2026 and into 2027, including the future of e-commerce, additional European fees, geopolitical instability and the need for greater global stability to support stronger air freight growth. In this interview Swissport’s global cargo growth strategy. Expansion across the United States, Europe, China and Asia. Opportunities in Africa and Latin America. Mergers and acquisitions, organic growth and joint ventures. The impact of Europe’s new e-commerce regulations. Lessons from the US low-value e-commerce market. The shift from e-commerce to consolidated shipments. Air cargo growth despite weaker e-commerce volumes. New commodities and rising cargo flows from Africa. The outlook for air freight in 2026 and 2027. The impact of geopolitical risk on freight demand and rates. Why air cargo can adapt quickly to market disruption. Subscribe for interviews and analysis covering air cargo, freight forwarding, shipping, logistics, supply chains and global trade. #AirCargo #AirFreight #AirCargoNews #Cargo #Logistics #SupplyChain #FreightForwarding #ECommerce #GlobalTrade #Aviation #CargoAirlines #AirCargoIndustry #Swissport #FreightBuyersClub #Geopolitics #SupplyChainManagement

#AI #SupplyChain Mike closes the episode by asking Pawan Joshi (Chief Strategy Officer, e2open), Nada Sanders (Distinguished Professor, Northeastern University) and Andre Simha (former digital transformation chief at MSC) for one genuinely positive take on technology in global trade, after an episode that covered plenty of the risks. Pawan Joshi starts with a bigger sweep of history. Just as the printing press freed people from having to memorise everything, and the internet put data at our fingertips, he argues AI now puts processed information and knowledge at our fingertips too. His view: it isn't doom and gloom, it's the next step in an evolution we're already benefiting from, provided people stay sharp enough to judge what AI gets wrong. Nada Sanders agrees, but adds a sharper point. As AI becomes commonplace and standardised, it stops being anyone's competitive advantage. What will actually separate companies that succeed is talent, because knowing how to combine machine intelligence with human judgement isn't something that can be easily copied. Andre Simha brings it back to a very concrete shipping problem: people still key the same information into five or ten different systems. He argues that solving that basic inconsistency is what would actually free people up from chasing "where's my box" questions and let them focus on real customer problems. He also shares a frustrating, and pretty funny, personal story about being stuck for three days going through five different chatbots on a well known professional platform before finally reaching a human, as a warning for what bad AI implementation looks like in practice. Watch the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club for more from Andre Simha, Pawan Joshi and Nada Sanders on disruption, resilience and technology in global supply chains.

#AirCargo #PeakSeason #Freight #SupplyChain #Logistics Peak season is almost here, and according to Neel Jones Shah, a lot of buyers have already left it too late. In this clip, Neel breaks down his advice for shippers and forwarders heading into peak: get creative with routing, widen the pool of carriers you work with, and stop waiting until September to start those conversations, they need to happen back in March, April, or May. He also flags the fuel price spike as a real threat to freighter margins, with WTI crude pushing past $100 a barrel and airlines looking to pass those costs on fast. Expect some capacity to shift away from less fuel-efficient aircraft as carriers protect their margins, even as overall demand into peak stays reasonably strong. Watch the full episode of Air Cargo Unpacked for more on where rates stand across Asia-Europe, the transatlantic, and China-US lanes. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube for more from the Freight Buyers' Club.

Henk Venema, Global Head of Air Freight at DHL Global Forwarding, on why he no longer sees a single global air cargo market, just sector and corridor driven pressure points, with extreme demand from Southeast Asia to the US. He explains why e-commerce volumes into the EU are now in double digit decline, following the same pattern seen in the US after new customs rules came into force, and why that is actually helping rather than hurting capacity, with hyperscale demand out of Southeast Asia on the Trans-Pacific taking up the slack. Venema also gives three predictions for the next twelve months: continued hyperscale demand growth into 2027, steady growth from legacy industrial shippers, and geopolitics, from the US midterms to Russia-Ukraine and the Middle East, as the biggest wildcard. He also explains why the traditional peak season concept no longer applies. This is the latest in a series of interviews filmed at the EU Cross-Border E-Commerce Forum in Liège, September 2026. The Freight Buyers' Club is an independent podcast, YouTube channel and newsletter for freight procurement decision-makers.

#ContainerShipping #ShippingIndustry #Logistics In this clip from The Freight Buyers' Club, Andre Simha, who chaired the Digital Container Shipping Association for seven years, explains why container shipping's real problem isn't technology. It's trust. Andre explains that getting fiercely competitive shipping lines to agree on basic data standards was hard, but achievable. Getting the industry to actually adopt those standards afterward has been much harder. He calls it a vicious circle. Everyone wants visibility, but sharing information means trusting other companies with it. He also compares today's AI evangelists to the blockchain evangelists who pitched him the same ideas a decade ago, in some cases the same people. His test for any new technology is simple. Does it remove a real, specific manual task. If not, he's not interested. Andre closes with the electronic bill of lading as proof of the problem. Years after the pandemic pushed hard for it, adoption still sits at only 10 to 20 percent. Andre Simha spent nearly 39 years at MSC, the world's largest container shipping line, the last five and a half as its digital transformation chief, before stepping down this spring.

#AirCargo #Logistics #SupplyChain Henk Venema, Global Head of Air Freight at DHL Global Forwarding, on why he no longer sees a single global air cargo market, just sector and corridor driven pressure points, with extreme demand from Southeast Asia to the US. He explains why e-commerce volumes into the EU are now in double digit decline, following the same pattern seen in the US after new customs rules came into force, and why that is actually helping rather than hurting capacity, with hyperscale demand out of Southeast Asia on the Trans-Pacific taking up the slack. Venema also gives three predictions for the next twelve months: continued hyperscale demand growth into 2027, steady growth from legacy industrial shippers, and geopolitics, from the US midterms to Russia-Ukraine and the Middle East, as the biggest wildcard. He also explains why the traditional peak season concept no longer applies. This is the latest in a series of interviews filmed at the EU Cross-Border E-Commerce Forum in Liège, September 2026. The Freight Buyers' Club is an independent podcast, YouTube channel and newsletter for freight procurement decision-makers.

When Drewry's Eleanor Hadland started in the sector, the port planning manuals used 65% stack utilisation as the norm, because peaks only happened seasonally. Now, with ultra large container vessels, a peak happens every time one arrives, and 85% is the norm instead. That extra 20% doesn't sound like much. But it's the buffer that used to absorb a storm, or a ship stuck in the Suez Canal. Eleanor, who leads ports and terminals research at Drewry, explains on the new episode of The Freight Buyers' Club. Full episode out now on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or at thefreightbuyersclub.com. Produced with the support of Dimerco Express Group, https://dimerco.com. #PortCongestion #ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub #Logistics

#SupplyChain #ColdChain Pawan Joshi (Chief Strategy Officer, e2open) uses a simple reefer container example to make a bigger point about technology in supply chains. Real time temperature monitoring on a refrigerated container does more than flag a broken cold chain. It tells your distribution centre, weeks before that container even arrives, that the goods inside are likely to be quarantined or thrown away. That's weeks of lead time to fix a shortage instead of discovering it on arrival day. As Pawan puts it, this isn't really about AI. It's about connecting the dots and closing the loop. Watch the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club for more on agentic AI and supply chain resilience. 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/02w9yX4sBOdZoemIOMX5iS 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agentic-ai-and-supply-chain-resilience-with-e2opens/id1668766055?i=1000788666152 🌐 Website: https://www.thefreightbuyersclub.com/podcast/agentic-ai-and-supply-chain-resilience-with-e2opens-pawan-joshi-northeasterns-nada-sanders-and-andre-simha-ex-msc/ ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQXnp7cbnJk

Each month, Neil Wilson of TAC Index, calculating agent for the Baltic Air Freight Indices, joins Mike King on Air Cargo Unpacked to break down what's driving air freight rates. This month it's still very much a seller's market. Asia-Europe pricing has shifted following the EU's de minimis changes, while the transatlantic holds its usual seasonal stability. China into the US remains strong, driven by AI demand and a resurgence in e-commerce flowing into Latin America. Fuel is the wildcard. WTI has spiked above $100 a barrel in the last few weeks, eating into freighter margins fast, and carriers are already pulling capacity on their less fuel-efficient aircraft. Neil and Mike also cover what buyers should be doing right now heading into peak season, and why September is already late to be starting those conversations. #AirCargo #AirFreight #TACIndex #BalticExchange #FreightRates #SupplyChain #Logistics #PeakSeason2026 #FreightBuyersClub

#AirCargo #AirFreight #OmanAir Reporting live from the EU Cross-Border E-commerce Forum in Liège this month, Mike King and Neel Jones Shah break down why EU e-commerce demand has stalled following new de minimis rules, drawing on conversations with regulators and industry figures at the forum, plus fresh data from Rotate. They also cover a new US Customs and Border Protection disclosure proposal and a companion trade crimes bill working through Congress, a fresh wave of freighter orders from Ethiopian Airlines, Afcom and MSC Air Cargo, and the runway accident involving an Amazon Prime Air flight at Miami International. Neil Wilson of TAC Index, calculating agent for the Baltic Air Freight Indices, joins with his monthly rates analysis and peak season outlook. In the second half, Mike Duggan, Head of Cargo at Oman Air, joins to talk through rebuilding Oman Air's cargo business after a turbulent year in the Gulf, Muscat's rise as a logistics hub, and his read on where the market goes next. Comes packed with new graphics, maps and animations to help make sense of it all. #SupplyChain #Logistics

Brandon Fried says the tracking technology built to protect shipments has now been hijacked by cargo thieves. Using geofencing tricks, criminals can make a stolen load look like it's still on route, even as it disappears. On the latest Air Cargo Unpacked, from The Freight Buyers' Club Podcast. #AirCargo #CargoTheft #Logistics #Shorts

#AirCargo #SupplyChain #Logistics Air cargo growth is running at 5.8% this year, but according to Maarten Wormer, head of consulting at Aevean, that headline figure hides two very different stories pulling the market in opposite directions. Transpacific eastbound trade from Asia to the US is up 24% so far this year, driven largely by hyperscaler data centre related air freight. Wormer cites 107,000 tonnes moved to the US in July alone, the equivalent of around 33 freighter flights a day. At the same time, EU e-commerce volumes fell 29% in July, following a new fee on low-value shipments that took effect at the start of the month, with France hit hardest. Platforms including Temu and AliExpress have dropped out of Europe's app store top 100 rankings and shifted advertising spend to other markets, including Brazil. Filmed at the EU Cross-Border E-commerce Forum (EUCBEC) in Liège, Belgium.

#AgenticAI #SupplyChain Andre Simha (former digital transformation chief at MSC), Pawan Joshi (Chief Strategy Officer, e2open) and Nada Sanders (Distinguished Professor, Northeastern University) each answer the same question: if agentic AI adoption in supply chains was a 90 minute football match, what minute are we actually in? Nada Sanders says kickoff has already happened, but puts the industry at around the 10th minute, with most teams still figuring out formation. Her bigger concern isn't the maturity curve itself. It's that as companies lean more on AI, they risk losing the human expertise and relationships needed to negotiate and make the right call under pressure. Pawan Joshi frames it as a team sport. Individually, he says, people are already using AI, maybe 10 to 15 minutes in. But there's no real choreography yet, no shared way for a business to move as a team rather than a collection of individuals. He compares it to learning to play an entirely different game once you can communicate in new ways altogether. Andre Simha lands on a similar estimate, but for a different reason. He's blunt about the limits of trust: would you really let a machine reroute a ship or approve a payment without a human checking it first? Not yet. He argues the industry needs more pilots, built on good data, before anyone hands real decisions over to an algorithm. From there the conversation turns to where agentic AI will actually create value over the next two to three years, and a harder question underneath all of it: when an autonomous system gets something wrong, who's accountable? Watch the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club for more from Andre, Pawan and Nada on disruption, resilience and technology in global supply chains.

Brandon Fried says his members are telling him the story of 2026 is AI equipment moving in and out of data centres. Servers that are barely a year old are already being swapped out for the next generation, and someone has to move that freight. On the latest Air Cargo Unpacked, from The Freight Buyers' Club Podcast. #AirCargo #DataCentres #AI #Logistics #Shorts

Neel Jones Shah on why air cargo rates aren't crashing the way they used to. Asset owners have gotten smarter about pricing, and the days of dropping rates to $2 out of Asia, not even enough to cover fuel, are over. A more disciplined, less boom-and-bust industry. On the latest Air Cargo Unpacked, from The Freight Buyers' Club Podcast. #AirCargo #FreightRates #Logistics #Shorts

# shipping #logtech #logistics #supplychain Disruption is now the baseline for global trade, not the exception. In this episode, Mike King brings together three guests who each look at that shift from a different vantage point: someone who spent decades at the top of one of the world's largest shipping lines, someone building the technology platform that connects the entire trade supply chain, and someone who studies how organizations actually make decisions under pressure. The panel gets into what real resilience looks like when it's built into a network, not added on after the fact. They talk about how much decision-making can and should go to technology, and where the limits are. One segment covers agentic AI specifically. It's the shift from AI that tells you what's happening to AI that decides and acts on its own. The panel weighs the pros and cons of letting it execute decisions in freight, and who's accountable when it gets the call wrong. The episode closes with each guest's read on who wins and who loses as the industry keeps adapting to disruption as the constant. Guests Pawan Joshi is Chief Strategy Officer at e2open, which became part of the $2 billion WiseTech Global group last year, after more than two decades building the company's supply chain platform. Nada Sanders is Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business, ranked among the top 2% of scientists worldwide by Stanford, and author of The Humachine. Andre Simha spent nearly 39 years at MSC, the world's largest shipping line, the last five and a half as its digital transformation chief, and chaired the Digital Container Shipping Association for seven years. 0:00 Why Disruption Is Now the Baseline for Trade 2:02 Meet the Panel 4:35 Firefighting vs Preventing Supply Chain Risk 7:05 Planning for a Range of Futures, Not One Plan 9:20 Inside the Ocean Shipping Index 11:15 The COVID Lead Time Failure 14:05 Supply Chain Visibility vs Early Warning 17:00 Three Practices for Earlier Risk Detection 19:05 The Human Machine and the Unilever Example 23:30 AI Vendor Promises and Where the Human Role Shifts 28:35 Supply Chains Built for a 50 to 70 Year Old World 32:10 The Cold Chain Example and Closing the Loop 36:50 Why e2open and CargoWise Came Together 44:30 Trust, Not Standards, Is the Real Barrier 47:10 Digital Supply Chain Standards and the Adoption Problem 52:00 Agentic AI vs the Blockchain Evangelists 56:00 Agentic AI and the Football Match Maturity Question 62:00 Who's Accountable When Agentic AI Gets It Wrong 69:00 What's Not Being Taken Seriously 73:10 Closing Predictions, Reasons for Optimism

Brandon Fried on how the Pan Am 103 bombing became the foundation of modern cargo security, from the Known Shipper Program to today's canine screening with the TSA and CBP. As a Syracuse University graduate, the tragedy that killed 35 of his fellow students gave him what he calls a higher calling to keep cargo moving safely and securely. On the latest Air Cargo Unpacked, from The Freight Buyers' Club Podcast. #AirCargo #AviationSecurity #Logistics #Shorts

When supply chains are disrupted, carrier profits tend to spike. And carriers now own almost fifty percent of the world's container terminals. So why would they be in a hurry to fix congestion? I put that to Eleanor Hadland, who leads ports and terminals research at Drewry, on the new episode of The Freight Buyers' Club. Her answer is blunt. Full episode out now on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or at thefreightbuyersclub.com. Produced with the support of Dimerco Express Group, https://dimerco.com. #PortCongestion #ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub

Maersk's CEO says lack of investment by ports is largely to blame for congestion at key gateways. Butbox shipping lines now own nearly half the world's container terminals, so is this really a port problem, or a carrier problem? Mike King is joined by Eleanor Hadland, who leads Drewry's ports and terminals research, to pick apart Vincent Clerc's claims about port underinvestment. Then they take a tour of the world's maritime bottlenecks: Shanghai and Ningbo, Europe's struggling hubs, the fifteen billion dollar scramble to build ports around the Strait of Hormuz, Panama Canal water levels, and West Africa's investment paradox. Thanks to Dimerco Express Group for supporting this episode, the best partner if you need a shipping or air cargo solution on the transpacific trades and beyond. Subscribe for more freight and supply chain conversations every week, and help us hit 10,000 YouTube subscribers. #Shipping #SupplyChain #Ports #Maersk #Logistics 0:00 Maersk's Vincent Clerc blames ports for the shipping delays and congestion 1:00 Eleanor Hadland on Drewry's ports and terminals research and her career at Associated British Ports 3:00 Does Vincent Clerc's claim about 15 years of port underinvestment stack up 8:00 Ocean carriers own 45% of global marine terminals, are carriers profiting from the congestion they blame on ports 12:00 Port congestion in Shanghai, Ningbo and Southeast Asia, new terminals at Tuas, Port Klang and Pasir Panjang 14:00 Port congestion in Rotterdam, Antwerp and Europe, low water on the Rhine and labour shortages 18:00 Jebel Ali and the Strait of Hormuz closure, can Dubai's ports ever fully recover 19:00 The $15 billion race to build ports at Khorfakkan, Fujairah, Jeddah and Oman 26:00 US port investment at Savannah, Baltimore and Long Beach, plus Mexico's Lazaro Cardenas and Manzanillo 27:00 Panama Canal low water and how it is shifting container routing to the US East Coast 31:00 Port congestion in West Africa, Tema, Lome and the Durban Gateway Terminal in South Africa 34:00 Eleanor Hadland's three things shippers should watch over the next two years 35:00 Does chronic port underinvestment actually make Maersk more money

Mark Chadwick, President of the Global Shippers' Association, calls out profiteering on both the carrier and forwarder side of the market, and explains why some partners simply won't make the cut going forward. This is a clip from the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club. Check us out on YouTube and all podcast platforms. Thanks to Dimerco Express Group (https://dimerco.com/) for sponsoring the show. #ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub #OceanFreight #Logistics #FreightForwarding #GlobalTrade