05 Dec 07 Having no Truck with Trailers
What is the best way to send goods from Madrid to northern Germany? Traditionally, the route would have been by Truck. But Samskip, the fast-growing Icelandic shipping company, is finding a growing market for using its ships as part of that journey in what it dubs “multimodal container logistics”.
The European Union is encouraging the development of “motorways of the sea” and plans to help the short-sea sector by scrapping customs controls for goods moving between EU ports. But, Samskip says, the market was in any case moving in that direction.
“We will find ourselves more and more forced to use multimodal - road, rail and barge - because of congestion,” Jacques Kleinkramer, Samskip’s chief commercial officer, says at the company’s operational headquarters in Rotterdam.
Founded in Iceland in 1990 and majority owned by Olafur Olafsson, executive chairman, Samskip’s core business had been in shipping refrigerated seafood. But the acquisition in 2005 of Geest North Sea Line in the Netherlands and Seawheel, the British short-sea shipper, allowed it to move into multimodal container transport.
At the heart of the system is the 45ft container, designed specifically to provide about the same space as a standard Trailer on a Truck. The container can be moved easily from Truck to rail to barge and on to one of Samskip’s 29 ships plying the North Sea, the Baltic and the Atlantic Ocean down to Spain.
Geest North Sea Line, a name no longer used by Samskip which is pushing its own brand, pioneered the use of the 45ft containers such that they became known as “Geests”. Ironically, given the EU’s interest in encouraging short-sea transport, they were threatened 10 years ago with a ban on the roads as the turning circle of a truck carrying one was slightly too big. The problem was solved by rounding off the container’s corners.
Although the 45ft container is not expected to kill off the Trailer truck, which would typically board a roll-on roll-off ferry for routes such as the busy Channel crossing, it does provide a compelling alternative. The containers are stackable, so there is no need for warehouses to provide temporary storage. Samskip offers its own trailer service for urgent shipments but says the multimodal option can have cost and even environmental benefits.
“The CO 2 emissions of trucks are much higher per container than for a multimodal solution,” says Menno Mooij, Samskip’s marketing manager for its multimodal business. “More and more customers are taking that into account - even if they are not necessarily prepared to pay more.”
A new EU regulation on driving time and obligatory rest periods could also hand Samskip and its peers an advantage over classic road haulage. The regulation, introduced in April, limits the total weekly driving time for a trucker.
“If the Truck driver is heading for Madrid but was delayed and only reached the French border, he just has to stop,” says Mr Mooij. “Planning for longer journeys has become more difficult.”
Samskip is expanding its east-west coverage across Europe to meet that kind of demand in addition to its already strong north-south routes. In the Madrid example, it would arrange overland transport to Bilbao and then ship to Rotterdam from where the cargo could go by rail, road or barge to Germany.
There is room for more efficiency, Mr Kleinkramer notes. Although Samskip is looking to acquire more rail capacity, the priority of passenger traffic over freight in busy summer months is a frustration. At the quayside things need to change too. “The mentality is still very much 8am to 4pm in many ports,” Mr Kleinkramer says. “We need to shift that to 24 hours.”
Tags: Truck Drivers
