Don Braid: Mainfreight Managing Director on the new shipping deal between Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk

There’s less optimism from Mainfreight over the impacts of global shipping changes.  

Two of the world's largest shipping companies Hapag-Lloyd and Maersk are joining forces, a move some commentators believe will reduce freight prices and provide arrival time reliability.  

But Mainfreight Managing Director Don Braid told Mike Hosking he's not sure it will mean cheaper freight rates, adding it mostly operates on the East to West corridors anyway. 

He says it's possible for cheaper freight to result from the Red Sea opening, meaning quicker shipping. 

However, Braid says, the chances of this happening are low. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good news. Possibly from the old supply chain. We've got
to tie up between Hapek, Lloyd and Mesk. So what
does that actually mean for this country? Main Freight Managing
Director Don Braids with us darn morning.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Yeah, morning, Mike.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Have you done well? Have you got a sense of
what this looks like and how it will unfold given
I'm assuming this is not the first time we've had
an alliance.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
No, there's three major alliances in the world. This is
just a change of the seats. I've decided to go
along alone. So it puts Musk and haphag Lloyd together
in a thing they're calling the Gemini Corporation. I'm not
sure that that means cheaper freight rates. It mostly operates
on the east to west corridors. Anyway. What might be

(00:43):
the answer for cheaper freight rates is that if the
Red Sea reopens, then we get quicker and faster more
capacity across the world in terms of the service canal opening.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
What do you reckon? The chances of that happening are.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Low. It's still unstable up there, isn't it?

Speaker 1 (01:02):
And yeah, I mean I was surprised that there isn't
more interest in it when it started and I was
watching these people land from helicopters onto ships. I thought,
surely someone's going to come and do something about this,
But they don't seem to have.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
No I think they're running protection more than anything else
for those vessels that are still transitting through there. But
the shipping lines found in an alternative route, which is longer,
of course, which reduced capacity, which keep the freight road tie.
So that's in the interest to the shipping lines, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
It is indeed all right, So that's the Red Sea.
So we're not going to solve that as far as
this alliance is concerned. What about the business of being
on time? Does anything improve out of this for us specifically?
Or we don't know yet.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
I don't think we know. It'll take a long time
to settle down. I think some of those port rotations
are still in the old alliance, so it'll be May
before we'll actually set operating. And it'll run on the
trans Pacific end into Europe, so it'll be Asia to
the States and to Europe, not necessarily affecting New Zealand
or Australia, so you know, we'll be part of a

(02:05):
transhipment service of that particular service of anything.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Okay, I was reading somewhere this morning that there's a
target of ninety percent on time. Currently it's fifty five percent.
Is that true? In other words, it's about half of
it turns up on time, half it doesn't.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, and we thought Kee we Rail were bad, right,
that's exactly right. And at fifty five percent, that's poor.
And I think that rather than the shipping line, that
comes down to congestion at ports and a lot of
congestion in Singapore. We've still got a lot of congestion
right now with Chinese New Year and the Trump tariff

(02:41):
tonnage that's been moving, So you've got a lot of
congestion in Chinese ports right now and that's what slows
those transit times down.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Good insight, Don appreciated as always. Don brad Main, Freight
Managing Director.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
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