Freight forwarders expand to receive SOC in the face of global container shortage

The shipper-owned container (SOC) request acceptance rate of the top 50 forwarders has increased from 6% in 2019 and 10% in 2020 to 18% in 2021, according to Container xChange.

According to Container xChange's annual 'Mystery Shopping SOC report', the percentage of shipper owned container (SOC) requests accepted by the top 50 forwarders has increased from 6% in 2019 and 10% in 2020 to 18% in 2021.

“Though there is considerable improvement in demand for SOCs, the major forwarders are yet to fulfill the demand for the boxes on the route from China to Germany,” Container xChange comment.

Florian Braun, head of ocean freight, EMEA, at Flexport, said: "SOC increases reliability for empty container availability. The downside is that you need a dedicated team/person to manage these shipments".

In addition, Christian Roeloffs, founder and CEO of Container xChange, believes that forwarders are increasingly positive about SOC shipping services but also uncertain about the success of the processes around them.

According to Roeloffs, the increase in awareness of SOC shows that industry participants are responding to supply chain pressures by diversifying their sourcing strategies. Roeloffs said: “We've observed a growing year-on-year acceptance for SOCs as well as demand to improve the management costs and efforts. We believe the solution lies in digitising the process to enable forwarders with a seamless, hassle-free opportunity of using SOCs."

In December 2021, Container xChange surveyed the world's 50 largest freight forwarders to see how they responded to requests for SOCs. They contacted to ship industrial machinery parts from Shanghai to Hamburg using SOCs and here are the results of the report:

18% of the companies surveyed are able to receive SOC shipping and sourcing SOC containers without any restrictions. This 18% figure compares to 10% for companies in 2020 and 6% in 2019.
Acceptance and awareness for SOC has increased over the past three years. 90% of respondents were interested in the SOC market compared to 68% of respondents last year and 35% in 2019.
Hitachi Transport System is one of the best freight forwarding companies, it even offers reasonable delivery fees. While in 2020 the forwarding companies that show the best for SOC are Kuehne + Nagel, CEVA Logistics, Hitachi Transport Systems, Nippon Express and Kerry Logistics; then in 2021 the results are GEFCO, Hitachi (again), Yusen Logistics, Landstar, Mainfreight, Kintetsu World Express, FedEX, BDP International and Millenium Cargo.
In 2021, forwarders in the lower cohorts do better than forwarders in the top 10. The forwarders in the Top 10 may already be saturated with business, especially before festive season. It is clear that SOC is becoming more and more possible for a wide range of freight forwarders. (Cohort 1 = Rank 1 - 10, Cohort 2 = Rank 11 - 20, etc.)

One of the recent Container xChange surveys in January 2022 with 500 respondents in the freight industry also indicated that a quarter of respondents considered the use of SOCs as one of their container sourcing strategies in 2022.

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Source: Phaata.com (According to ContainerNews)

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