By Ashley Kao

From the beginning of the year 2020, due to the factors of Chinese Lunar year and outbreak of Covid-19, the import and export industry in China almost shutdown. The entire supply chain has also been greatly affected. It put the entire forwarding industry under pressure.From the beginning of the year 2020, due to the factors of Chinese Lunar year and outbreak of Covid-19, the import and export industry in China almost shutdown. The entire supply chain has also been greatly affected. It put the entire forwarding industry under pressure.

After that, with the steady progress of resumption of work and production in China, the domestic ports have resumed operations one after another, imports and exports returned to operate normally. However, the increase of Covid-19 cases overseas kept increasing, which caused global trading suffered a severe setback.

While facing challenges, the digital development in post-pandemic has brought in-depth changes to the entire ocean logistic industry. The business transformed to digitalization from all aspects, such as E-commerce platform, which changed the business model of traditional forwarders. Since the Maersk Spot e-commerce platform released, more carriers (ONE/ COSCO) have launched e-commerce platforms and made a breakthrough for their business development.

On forwarder’s side, e-commerce platforms reduce their job opportunities and profit because all data information such as space, rates, shipping schedules are easy to check online. The e-platforms control bookings, and charge higher fee for cancellation, and it incurred more challenges for forwarders. However, it may be an opportunity for forwards to optimize their business structure. They can also get a chance to cooperate with carrier’s e-platforms to meet space demand. The convenient online communication makes it more efficient between the shipper and forwarders, which decreased the cancellation rate than before. In future, forwarding companies need to strengthen services and operations such as warehouses, trucks…etc. The forwarder services should extent to the user/end side to get more business opportunities.