The Freight Buyers' Club

In this extended interview from Air Cargo Unpacked, retiring Airforwarders Association Executive Director Brandon Fried looks back on a career that started almost by accident: a relative in the forwarding business, warehouse work, fine art logistics, legal document delivery, and eventually his own operation in Washington DC before joining AfA.

Brandon reflects on what he's most proud of: helping build the modern cargo security framework in the wake of the Pan Am 103 bombing, working with the TSA and Customs and Border Protection to create the Known Shipper Program and canine screening. Neel Jones Shah, who worked alongside Brandon from both the airline and forwarder side, pays tribute to his impact on the industry. Brandon also shares his biggest concern for the future of air freight forwarding (uncertainty and poorly informed regulation, "you're either at the table or you're on the menu"), and his message to whoever succeeds him: stay engaged with companies of every size, not just the big ones. And yes, he confirms his next title: Vice President of Lunch.

From The Freight Buyers' Club Podcast.

#AirCargo #FreightForwarding #AviationSecurity #Logistics #SupplyChain

Mike King travels to Maersk's Southeast Asia head office in Singapore to talk with Elaine Low, Area Managing Director for Southeast Asia at A.P. Moller-Maersk, about the intra-Asia container trades. It's the world's biggest container trade, and one that rarely gets the attention it deserves, even with Drewry's Intra-Asia Container Index at three-year highs.

Elaine explains how manufacturers expanding across the region and fast-growing Asian consumer markets are driving demand. She highlights automotive and EVs, electronics and the semiconductor ecosystem as key industries. She also argues that the real constraint is landside infrastructure at Southeast Asia's many smaller ports, and says every port in the region is effectively full.

The conversation also covers how Maersk's Gemini hub-and-spoke network has helped it deal with typhoons and geopolitical disruption, the balance between contract and spot demand, how surcharges have been passed on, and what Maersk's integrator strategy offers shippers in Asia.

#Maersk #IntraAsia #ContainerShipping #PortCongestion #SoutheastAsia #FreightBuyersClub #Logistics

In this extended clip from The Freight Buyers' Club, Pawan Joshi, Chief Strategy Officer at e2open, digs into how far AI has actually taken supply chains, and where the real opportunity still sits.

Pawan explains that a lot of supply chain processes and company structures were designed decades ago, in a world before the internet, before cell phones, when even desktop computing was limited. Technology has moved on dramatically since then. His point is that the real opportunity isn't just adding AI on top of existing processes. It's rethinking them with today's connectivity and compute in mind.

He walks through a real example: monitoring temperature in real time on a refrigerated shipping container. Catching a broken cold chain early gives a business weeks of lead time to plan around a shortage, rather than finding out only when the container arrives. He calls this closing the loop, a concept borrowed from control systems. His argument is that closing the loop matters more than which specific technology, AI included, does the work.

Pawan also explains the logic behind e2open and WiseTech's CargoWise coming together. He breaks the supply chain into three groups: the people who make products, the people who sell them, and the people who move them. CargoWise was built for the movers, e2open for the makers and sellers, and bringing them together aims to connect the whole chain rather than stopping at the handoff points.

Finally, he addresses what actually blocks companies from sharing supply chain data across their networks. His answer: not a lack of standards, but a lack of trust.

an Dubai's ports ever recover from the Hormuz closure? Mike King and Drewry port specialist Eleanor Hadland analyse the region's shifting maritime landscape. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced a rethink of logistics across the Middle East. With global trade routes under constant pressure, this episode examines how Middle Eastern logistics are adapting to new geopolitical realities. Eleanor Hadland joins the show to break down the massive capital expenditure currently flooding into the region, including the new 434 million dollar terminal in Jeddah and the wider scramble for infrastructure investment. Beyond the Gulf, we look at the feasibility of alternative overland routes and the long-term outlook for Dubai's port sector. If you are tracking the future of global supply chain capacity and regional port investment, this analysis provides the expert perspective you need on where the money is going and why. 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. Can Dubai's ports ever recover from the Hormuz closure? Mike King and port specialist Eleanor Hadland analyse the region's shifting maritime landscape. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced a rethink of logistics across the Middle East. With global trade routes under constant pressure, this episode examines how Middle Eastern logistics are adapting to new geopolitical realities. Eleanor Hadland joins the show to break down the massive capital expenditure currently flooding into the region, including the new 434 million dollar terminal in Jeddah and the wider scramble for infrastructure investment. Beyond the Gulf, we look at the feasibility of alternative overland routes and the long-term outlook for Dubai's port sector. If you are tracking the future of global supply chain capacity and regional port investment, this analysis provides the expert perspective you need on where the money is going and why. 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.

#StraitOfHormuz #PortInvestment #ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub

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.

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.

#ContainerShipping #ShippingIndustry #Logistics

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 #AirCargo #AirFreight #OmanAir

Disruption is now the baseline for global trade, not the exception. This episode looks at what real resilience takes on the ground, how technology fits in as decision infrastructure, and covers agentic AI, including who's accountable when it gets the call wrong. Mike King speaks with three guests who bring experience and insight from different perspectives across the industry.

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

#SupplyChain #Resilience #Logistics #GlobalTrade #Disruption #SupplyChainManagement #DigitalTransformation #FreightBuyersClub #AgenticAI #ArtificialIntelligence #ContainerShipping

Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc says ports are to blame for the congestion hitting shippers this year. But ocean carriers now control nearly half the world's marine terminals, so how much of this is really down to a lack of port investment, and how much comes back to the carriers themselves?

Mike is joined by Eleanor Hadland, who leads Drewry's ports and terminals research and runs her own advisory practice, Hadland Maritime. They get into whether Vincent Clerc's numbers on port underinvestment stack up, why carrier terminal ownership is only going to grow, and why congestion is arguably a supply chain problem, not just a port one.

They then take a tour of the world's most disrupted trades: chronic congestion in Shanghai and Ningbo, low water and strikes hitting Europe's biggest hubs, the $15 billion scramble to build ports around the Strait of Hormuz after the closure that took Jebel Ali out of the world's top 30 ports, the Panama Canal's own water problems, and West Africa's paradox of huge investment alongside rising delays.

Guest: Eleanor Hadland, Senior Analyst, Ports and Terminals, Drewry Maritime Research, and Director, Hadland Maritime.

Thanks to Dimerco Express Group for supporting this episode. They are the best partner if you need a shipping or air cargo solution on the transpacific trades and beyond.

Topics covered:
Why Vincent Clerc blames a lack of port investment for global congestion. Whether carrier terminal ownership, now nearly 45 percent of global capacity, is part of the problem. Why Chinese ports are running at 85 percent stack utilisation with almost no buffer. Europe's low water, strikes and labour shortages. The Hormuz closure and the four country, fifteen billion dollar scramble to route around it. Panama Canal water levels and what they mean for routing decisions. Why West Africa keeps getting investment and still sees rising delays. What shippers should actually be watching over the next two years.

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

#FreightBuyersClub #SupplyChain #Shipping #Ports #Maersk #Drewry #Logistics #ContainerShipping #Hormuz #OceanFreight

Mike King and Neel Jones Shah are joined for the whole episode by Brandon Fried, Executive Director of the Airforwarders Association, who has announced his retirement after two decades leading the organisation.

This month: how the AI data centre build-out is reshaping air cargo demand, and the fallout from the EU's de minimis change on volumes through Liège. Cargo theft losses hit $725 million last year across US and Canadian freight, and an Airforwarders Association survey found 83% of forwarders reporting reduced shipping volumes due to tariffs. We also dig into the fight over IATA's revised Direct Air Waybill framework, the rules governing who's liable when cargo is misdeclared or mishandled, which forwarders say could shift liability onto them.

Plus the best rates analysis in the business from Neil Wilson at TAC Index, a tribute to Jan Krems as he steps down as President of United Cargo, and a look back at Brandon Fried's nearly 25 years leading the Airforwarders Association as he hands over the reins.

Many thanks to Brandon Fried for joining us for the whole episode, to Neil Wilson for his rates analysis, and to TAC Index and the Baltic Exchange for their continued support of Air Cargo Unpacked.

For more from the Freight Buyers' Club, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube.