Shanghai Shipping Exchange and CargoSmart Join Forces to Establish a New Shipping Index

While not all the news emanating from China has been particularly positive these days, a new development in the ocean cargo arena looks promising for global supply chain managers.

Shanghai Shipping Exchange, a leading shipping index organization, and CargoSmart Limited, a leading global shipment management software provider, have signed a Memorandum of Cooperation to develop a new shipping index for ocean carrier schedule reliability.

Working together, Shanghai Shipping Exchange and CargoSmart may create a new methodology to calculate schedule reliability for key trade lanes to help shippers optimize their supply chains and for the industry as a whole to improve service quality.

As an open, fair and unbiased platform, Shanghai Shipping Exchange has been playing a significant role in providing up-to-date and accurate shipping information for the global shipping market, including publishing the China Containerized Freight Index (CCFI) and Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI).

“The alliance with CargoSmart allows us to expand the insights we provide for the shipping industry,” said Yao Weifu, Vice President of Shanghai Shipping Exchange. “We look forward to collaborating with CargoSmart to deliver a new shipping index that increases transparency to ocean carrier performance.”

With over 20 years of experience in providing shipping management solutions and connections with more than 20 ocean carriers, CargoSmart monitors and analyzes over 16,000 vessels, 1,400 global container ports, 3,000 ocean carrier services representing 85% of the market, and 10 million sailing schedules.

By tapping into its comprehensive database and applying analytics, CargoSmart will enable effective and accurate measurement of ocean carriers' schedule reliability performance.

“CargoSmart and Shanghai Shipping Exchange share a common desire to improve supply chain efficiency and productivity,” said Lionel Louie, chief commercial officer of CargoSmart. “Our cooperation will extend our contributions to the shipping industry.”

Louie added in an interview that CargoSmart isdeveloping the methodology and mechanics of the new index.

“The details of the index will be announced later,” he said. Meanwhile, C.H. Robinson could be a potential customer of the index.

“At C.H. Robinson, we are committed to providing a customer-centric and efficient operation that takes customer needs, market conditions and regulations into account for our customers to optimize their supply chains,” said Kim Guan, Ocean Service Manager of logistics service provider, C.H. Robinson. “We are excited that the Shanghai Shipping Exchange will be offering a standardized schedule reliability index that we can benchmark to offer more insightful carrier and route recommendations for our customers.”

Shanghai Shipping Exchange and CargoSmart plan to establish the index scope and methodology through a joint working group to further develop new insights for the shipping industry.

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