Podcast

Peak season has arrived with wartime costs attached. In this month’s Air Cargo Unpacked, Mike King and Neel Jones Shah ask whether there is still such a thing as a traditional peak season. They look at how soaring jet fuel prices are hitting airlines and shippers, and what the conflict in the Middle East means for air cargo, from the attacks on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport to contain...

A year ago, we asked whether global trade was entering an era of chaos. A year on, it looks less like chaos and more like a new, fragmented normal: the US has built a new, stacked tariff regime out of four separate legal authorities, the EU has ended its duty-free threshold for cheap parcels, and customs authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are quietly redefining what it means to import somet...

Container shipping has become "advantage carrier", according to John McCown of The McCown Report. US demand on the transpacific has been flat for a second year, yet spot rates have soared, and by John's count carriers made around $6bn in net income in the second quarter, seven times the first. So what can shippers actually do about it? In this container shipping special, produced with the support...

In this extended interview from Air Cargo Unpacked, retiring Airforwarders Association Executive Director Brandon Fried looks back on a career that started almost by accident: a relative in the forwarding business, warehouse work, fine art logistics, legal document delivery, and eventually his own operation in Washington DC before joining AfA. Brandon reflects on what he's most proud of: helping b...

Mike King travels to Maersk's Southeast Asia head office in Singapore to talk with Elaine Low, Area Managing Director for Southeast Asia at A.P. Moller-Maersk, about the intra-Asia container trades. It's the world's biggest container trade, and one that rarely gets the attention it deserves, even with Drewry's Intra-Asia Container Index at three-year highs. Elaine explains how manufacturers expand...

In this extended clip from The Freight Buyers' Club, Pawan Joshi, Chief Strategy Officer at e2open, digs into how far AI has actually taken supply chains, and where the real opportunity still sits. Pawan explains that a lot of supply chain processes and company structures were designed decades ago, in a world before the internet, before cell phones, when even desktop computing was limited. Technol...

an Dubai's ports ever recover from the Hormuz closure? Mike King and Drewry port specialist Eleanor Hadland analyse the region's shifting maritime landscape. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced a rethink of logistics across the Middle East. With global trade routes under constant pressure, this episode examines how Middle Eastern logistics are adapting to new geopolitical realities. Ele...

Nada Sanders, Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University and author of The Human/Machine, has spent decades studying how businesses forecast risk, and years serving as an expert witness in cases involving AI vendors. In this clip she explains what that experience has taught her, and it isn't flattering to the industry. Her clearest warning is about hidden costs. She says she can "almost gu...

In this clip from The Freight Buyers' Club, Andre Simha, who chaired the Digital Container Shipping Association for seven years, explains why container shipping's real problem isn't technology. It's trust. Andre explains that getting fiercely competitive shipping lines to agree on basic data standards was hard, but achievable. Getting the industry to actually adopt those standards afterward has be...

Reporting live from the EU Cross-Border E-commerce Forum in Liège this month, Mike King and Neel Jones Shah break down why EU e-commerce demand has stalled following new de minimis rules, drawing on conversations with regulators and industry figures at the forum, plus fresh data from Rotate. They also cover a new US Customs and Border Protection disclosure proposal and a companion trade crimes bil...

Disruption is now the baseline for global trade, not the exception. This episode looks at what real resilience takes on the ground, how technology fits in as decision infrastructure, and covers agentic AI, including who's accountable when it gets the call wrong. Mike King speaks with three guests who bring experience and insight from different perspectives across the industry. Guests Pawan Joshi i...

Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc says ports are to blame for the congestion hitting shippers this year. But ocean carriers now control nearly half the world's marine terminals, so how much of this is really down to a lack of port investment, and how much comes back to the carriers themselves? Mike is joined by Eleanor Hadland, who leads Drewry's ports and terminals research and runs her own advisory pract...

Mike King and Neel Jones Shah are joined for the whole episode by Brandon Fried, Executive Director of the Airforwarders Association, who has announced his retirement after two decades leading the organisation. This month: how the AI data centre build-out is reshaping air cargo demand, and the fallout from the EU's de minimis change on volumes through Liège. Cargo theft losses hit $725 million las...

Container carriers are pulling sailings on purpose, missing their own reliability targets, and posting some of their strongest profits in years. Mike King is joined by Nils Roche, Founder of Solvens Advisory and a former liner executive with senior roles at CMA CGM, Maersk and PIL, and Mark Chadwick, President of the Global Shippers' Association, representing some of the world's biggest cargo owne...

Mike King speaks with Adrien Thominet, Chairman and Founder of AERION, about why the GSSA model at the heart of air cargo is being reinvented from the ground up. Thominet explains how AERION has moved beyond the classic GSSA structure, building out dedicated arms for pharma (Healthcare), e-commerce (Mail & More), total cargo management (TCE) and digital transformation (CargoTech), all under on...

Recorded at Air Cargo China in Shanghai, Mike sits down with Cédric Millet, President of CargoTech, for an exclusive look at how one company is pulling air cargo's software under a single roof. CargoTech is a holding company, backed by the same owner as ECS Group, the world's largest cargo GSA. It brings together specialist software companies, each focused on its own domain. Millet's pitch is a si...

Mike King is in Shanghai for Air Cargo China, and he sat down with Kathy Liu, VP global sales and marketing at Dimerco Express Group, for a fast read on what is really moving across ocean and air. Container rates have climbed since March, and Kathy explains the mix behind it: vessels tied up by Middle East disruption, a shortage of empty boxes at key Asian origins, and shippers front-loading ahead...

Trade wars used to be something economists told you to avoid. Nobody wins one, so you don't fight. That argument is over. In this episode of The Freight Buyers' Club, Mike King talks to trade economist Chad Bown about why the old rules-based system has gone, and what that means for anyone who sources, ships or moves cargo for a living. Chad Bown is the Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at the Peterson...

Richard Broekman, Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Sustainability at Atlas Air, joins Mike King and Neel Jones Shah for the June episode of Air Cargo Unpacked. Atlas flies 113 widebody freighters, around 13% of the world's widebody freighter fleet, so few people have a better view of where this market is heading. Richard gives a first-hand account of how Atlas managed the US de minimis shock i...

China's exports to the US have fallen, but China hasn't slowed down. It has redirected. In this clip from the latest episode of The Freight Buyers' Club, Nigel Pusey, CEO of Container Trades Statistics, walks through where the cargo is going now: Sub-Saharan Africa up 33% in Q1 2026, South and Central America up 17%, India up 17%. He explains why this started before the latest round of tariffs, an...

The first episode of FBC Opinion, a new series from The Freight Buyers' Club. One expert, one argument, straight to camera, no host. In 2019, Akhil Nair wrote that container shipping would consolidate from 22 carriers to 12 within four years. Not through mergers. Through game theory. Seven years later, the count is exactly twelve. In this opinion piece, Akhil audits his own 2019 thesis. What he go...

Forget Trump's tariffs. The biggest story in container shipping isn't what's happening at America's ports. It's what's happening everywhere else. In the first quarter of 2026, the global container market grew 4.4% despite the Strait of Hormuz being shut, fresh war in the Middle East, and Cape of Good Hope sailings now stretching east-west trade to breaking point. But underneath the headlines, the...

In this clip from The Freight Buyers' Club, three of the sharpest minds in logistics technology give three very different answers to the same question: in three years, which type of company wins? Zubin Appoo, CEO of WiseTech Global, says integrated platforms with AI at the core displace everything else. Wolfgang Lehmacher, former Head of Supply Chain at the World Economic Forum, backs the ecosyste...

Is Amazon replacing the 3PL? In this episode of Air Cargo Unpacked, Mike King and co-host Neel Jones Shah dig into Amazon Supply Chain Services and what it really means for third party logistics providers, freight forwarders and the air cargo market. Is this a genuine supply chain management revolution or just a repackaging of existing services? Also in this May episode: the Middle East capacity r...

The Trump administration’s tariff programme has suffered another legal defeat. The US Court of International Trade ruled 2-1 against the 10% Section 122 global surcharge, the replacement for the IEEPA reciprocal tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court in February. So which tariffs are actually still standing, and what comes next?  Mike King is joined by Karen Kenney, founder and president of K2 T...