This week on The Manifest, the newsroom's weekly podcast: the sixth straight fall in container rates, copper's upside-down pricing, the fog season on the North Sea rivers and the night a feeder ship sails with nobody on the bridge. The full episode is in the player above. You can also find The Manifest in any podcast app.
Hosted by Kenji Arakawa, with Maren Okafor, Tomás Reyes and a guest who spent twenty-six years guiding ships through fog.
00:00 The boxes
The Break Freight Index has now fallen for six weeks in a row. Maren explains where the slack is coming from: a wave of newbuild deliveries, carriers cancelling sailings to hold rates up, and which lanes are softening fastest. Kenji walks through the index chart and why the transpacific is behaving differently from Asia–Europe. Then a short argument about whether blank sailings still work when every carrier is doing them at once.
Read: Container rates fall for a sixth week.
12:40 The copper road
Tomás, on the line from Santiago, explains why smelters are now paying miners to take their concentrate. Treatment charges have turned negative in parts of the market, and he describes what that means for a smelter's accounts, for the mines, and for the trucks that carry ore down one narrow road from the high Andes. He also explains why a single access road can matter more to the price than a mine's reserves.
Read: Copper's quiet squeeze.
24:15 Fog season
Captain Ingrid Solberg piloted ships on the approaches to northern European rivers for twenty-six years before she retired. She tells Kenji what a pilot sees, and does not see, in dense fog, why pilot boardings stop when visibility drops below a few hundred metres, and why a closed river empties the terminals first and fills the anchorages second. She also has opinions about radar, electronic charts and the one instrument she never sailed without: a thermos.
"You can hear the ships before you see them," she says. "In real fog, you never see them at all."
Update, this morning: the fog she described came in on the Elbe overnight. Follow our live coverage.
36:30 The crewless ship
Tonight Maren is in a control room ashore as Nordvik Feeder Lines sends its autonomous feeder Skarv out of a Norwegian fjord towards Rotterdam, with no one aboard. Before she left, she recorded this segment on what the watchkeepers ashore can and cannot do, what the rules require of a ship with nobody on the bridge, and what it means for the feeder crews who do this run today.
Update, this morning: her report from the control room is up. Read Twelve thousand tonnes and no one on the bridge.
47:05 Figures of the week
Kenji's closing round of numbers: how many ships passed through the Singapore Strait on our Chokepoint Tracker this week, the day count on our container diary, and one figure from the tape that surprised the whole desk. Plus a listener question about why freight is still invoiced in dollars. The long answer is here.
Credits
- Host and producer: Kenji Arakawa
- With: Maren Okafor, shipping editor; Tomás Reyes, commodities correspondent
- Guest: Captain Ingrid Solberg, retired river pilot
- Sound: recorded in our Rotterdam studio and on a phone line from Santiago
Also in this issue of the desk: our long read Ninety days with box NRVU 418220-7, and the full Chokepoints issue.
Discussion