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The day’s most important moves across every mode — air, rail, road, ocean and the trade that ties them together.
| ● On the Wire |
Monday, September 28 |
5 stories |
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The Northwest Seaport Alliance connects Pacific Northwest shippers to Asia with some of the shortest transit times on the West Coast, backed by deep-water berths and on-dock rail at both Seattle and Tacoma.
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Ocean
BY STUART CHIRLS · AMERICAN SHIPPER · SEPTEMBER 25, 2026
Hapag-Lloyd and Israeli private-equity firm FIMI have reworked the terms of their $4.2 billion bid for Zim, aiming to clear lingering Israeli government concerns over maritime security and strategic assets.
| THE TAKE — The restructuring tells you how much leverage Israeli regulators actually have here: carving Zim’s Israeli-flagged assets into a separate FIMI-controlled entity, dropping the foreign-ownership scrutiny threshold from 24% to 10%, and guaranteeing 16 vessels (five more than required) for wartime use are real concessions, not paperwork. Shareholders already approved the deal at a rich 58% premium, so the remaining friction is entirely political. With a combined fleet topping 400 vessels and 3 million TEUs of capacity, Hapag-Lloyd clearly still wants this closed by year-end — the question is whether Israel’s government moves as fast as the buyers want it to. |
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Tankers
Trafigura is launching a standalone shipowner, Volare Shipping, and heading for an Oslo listing as it shifts from chartering tankers to owning them outright amid record-high freight rates.
| THE TAKE — A trading house building its own 14-ship VLCC fleet, six of them already in the water, is a tell about how long Trafigura expects tanker rates to stay elevated. At roughly $1 million a day for spot tonnage — driven largely by disruption from the Iran war — owning capacity instead of renting it stops being a hedge and starts being the more profitable trade. The $500 million raise and October Euronext Growth listing suggest Trafigura wants outside capital funding the newbuilds, not just its own balance sheet. |
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Air Cargo
Construction-driven congestion at Mumbai’s airport has pushed Lufthansa Cargo to suspend six weekly freighter flights through month-end, with truck wait times stretching up to three days.
| THE TAKE — The timing is the real problem: this suspension lands right before the pre-festive peak, when time-sensitive and odd-sized cargo volumes are climbing fastest. That Lufthansa is using the pause to shift permanently to the new Navi Mumbai airport when service resumes October 1 — following Cathay’s earlier move there — suggests carriers see the old airport’s congestion as structural, not a one-off construction hiccup. Expect other freighter operators serving Mumbai to face the same calculus. |
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Rail
Weekly AAR data show combined U.S. rail traffic up nearly 5% year-over-year, with intermodal volume leading the gains as the network heads deeper into peak season.
| THE TAKE — Intermodal’s 6.9% year-over-year gain is doing the heavy lifting here, and it’s broad-based — metallic ores, petroleum products and industrial minerals all posted double-digit or high-single-digit increases. Grain and coal dragging the carload side down isn’t new, but the year-to-date combined traffic run-rate (up 3.4% through 37 weeks) suggests rail is capturing real freight rather than just riding a soft prior-year comparison. |
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Parcel & Last Mile
An oversight report finds commercial shippers are increasingly abandoning return-to-sender packages at USPS rather than paying to reclaim them, costing the agency well over $100 million a year.
| THE TAKE — The economics explain the behavior perfectly: when return postage and processing can eat 20-65% of an item’s value, refusing the package and letting USPS absorb the cost is simply cheaper for fulfillment centers. But the more damning finding is the accounting failure underneath it — a decade-old spreadsheet error double-counting returns and 27 million packages missing from operational records means USPS doesn’t fully know the scale of what it’s losing, let alone how to price against it. |
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This week on American Shipper TV: what the Zim deal restructuring and record tanker rates signal about ocean and energy shipping heading into Q4. Watch the full segment →
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OCT 27–28, 2026 · THE SIGNAL, CHATTANOOGA, TN
FreightWaves’ flagship event blends rapid-fire tech demos and world-class speakers with the most legendary networking in logistics. Join 1,000+ freight and logistics experts, industry leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators for a definitive look at the year ahead. Come for the insights, stay for the celebration and leave with the connections that will define your 2027.
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American Shipper · The Daily — published weekdays
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