News & Insights

Despite the UK economy edging 0.4% higher in February, helped by a partial rebound in trade with the EU as exporters learnt to deal with new Brexit border restrictions, many more are having to dramatically change their business model, or have simply stopped exporting to the bloc. In ... Read more

Terminal operations and supporting infrastructure at the most important mainland European and UK ports will be put under immense pressure over the next four weeks, as they try to work through the backlog of 1.9m teu delayed by the six-day Suez Canal closure. Over 370,000 teu is currently en ro... Read more

The latest air cargo figures from the International Air Transport Association, the trade association of the world's airlines, shows that while demand is growing ahead of pre-Covid levels, capacity is impeding growth and keeping prices far above the pre-pandemic levels. Measuring air freight de... Read more

The 400m long vessel blocked the canal for six days and more than a dozen tug boats, multiple dredgers and 800 personnel were used in the recovery operation, with Egyptian authorities reportedly seeking more than $1 billion in damages to cover these costs and the loss of canal revenue. Th... Read more

As global shipping struggles to adjust from the Ever Given grounding and the six day Suez Canal closure, container carriers have the challenge of recovering schedules and repositioning containers due to the effect of over a week’s loss of capacity. With close to... Read more

Shipping executives had an opportunity to be front and centre in the international news cycle and deliver an important message about how trade works. Instead, they chose to hide in the shadows. Complaints about sea blindness will not be taken seriously next time they matter. A week-long shut d... Read more

Airlines are imposing security charges for cargo arriving from the UK on road feeder services for flights out of European hub airports. Following the end of the post-Brexit transition period in January, EU law no longer recognises feeder trucked cargo from the UK as air cargo secure, and requi... Read more

The EU is to drop ‘Meursing codes’ from import declarations for manufactured food products coming from the UK in a major reduction of post-Brexit red tape, but new EU legislation covering multi-ingredient food products is expected to increase UK export health certificates by up to 3... Read more

While the EU/UK vaccine spat has underlined the interconnectivity of supply chains, Boris Johnson is putting an invisible trade barrier between France and the UK and 25% of UK SMEs have stopped exporting to the EU altogether. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is... Read more

Metro’s drive towards increased digitising of all business operations and customer interfaces is accelerating with the appointment of industry tech leader, Claus Rasmussen to the technical solutions team, in the new role of Director of Information Systems. Claus will take the quality, resili... Read more

There has been only one story in town for the last week! Even though the Ever Given has been re-floated and the Suez Canal is working to clear the backlog of waiting vessels, a huge amount of uncertainty remains and we should still expect a shortage of containers at many origins, vessel diversion... Read more

One of the first casualties of the Ever Given’s grounding in the Suez Canal was vessel visibility and shipping line schedule integrity. With so many vessels delayed, out of position or diverted, visibility of their cargo’s location was critical for shippers but, with most shipping lines unabl... Read more