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Global shipping container shortage is now a container surplus
- PedroBatista 4y agoThis industry always has been surprisingly volatile and many big companies have been killed by the boom bust cycles. The container thing ( the right amount at the right place and right time ) is a symptom of the problem.
- pcurve 4y agoRip Hanjin Shipping
- mwint 4y agoTonight at 9: Surprising doomsayers, the market worked again!
- mindslight 4y agoIf you ever rent a truck/trailer, please have someone else load it. Wild oscillation is not desirable behavior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mW_gzdh6to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mW_gzdh6to
- mwint 4y agoI mean, I have probably loaded and driven heavier loads than you have. This analogy is about as strained as it gets.
- mindslight 4y agoPerhaps. It wasn't an analogy, but rather a vibrant reference to the concept of oscillation. Your original comment declares a simplistic version of "working" based around having reached one specific condition, while writing off the dynamic system behavior and other effects that occurred while getting to this point. Now, do we have reasons to be believe that this oscillation between shortage and surplus will grow or diminish? Will the next half-cycle of the oscillation create negative qualitative effects, even if it is ultimately diminishing? I'm not saying there are easy answers to those questions, but we're better off being able to ask them.
- mwint 4y agoMaybe we can ask a related question: How can we profit from these oscillations? If they're predictable, there should be an arbitrage opportunity.
- MrMan 4y agoI just bought a shipping container so I am doing my part
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- heavenlyblue 4y agoHow about you suggest an actual business plan than an abstract idea?
- losteric 4y agoDoesn't arbitrage reflect pricing inefficiency? What is inefficient in container pricing? I can certainly see opportunity to profit through stock market inefficiencies. Eg transportation stocks that were overpriced on supply chain FUD
- toast0 4y agoThe way to profit from gluts and squeezes is to warehouse products. Warehousing perishable products is much harder. If you store the products in containers, it's easier to ship them when there's a squeeze, and you're also warehousing containers ;) Of course, the more people who buy the glut and sell the squeeze, the less of a glut and a squeeze there is.
- bertjk 4y agoOf course, if you do warehouse products, and then try to take advantage of a squeeze, then you may get accused of price gouging.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- an_taeus 4y agoThe actionable advice here is if you're loading a trailer, you want weight / center of gravity as close to the front / cab as possible. If loading, y'know, 40,000 lbs for a tractor trailer and you're loading it with pallets, alternate the pallet rows as far to the left and right as possible, switching direction every row. This prevents tipping and also does a favor to the person who has to unload it at the destination as it prevents weird slippages of pallet orientation and crunching. Poorly loaded trailers can definitely kill the trucker and other drivers. The oscillation severity really depends on the spread between the greatest and least weight of the items going into the trailer.
- sudosysgen 4y agoTaking multiple years to correct a critical shortage and then overcorrecting is not a good example of markets being efficient. Any kind of system that responds to usage can do this, the criteria is about speed of correction, lack of oscillation, and avoidance of side effects.
- Doxin 4y agoIt's clear, We need a PID controller running the markets. Only half joking.
- carlmr 4y agoMaybe we are doing PID, but we need anti-windup.
- infogulch 4y agoI wasn't familiar with anti-windup, so I found https://www.scilab.org/pid-anti-windup-schemes https://www.scilab.org/pid-anti-windup-schemes that seems to cover the concept reasonably well. One thing I noticed is that smoothing functions that reduce overshooting the response also add some delay to the time taken to first reach the command threshold. This is interesting, if not quite surprising.
- carlmr 4y ago>I wasn't familiar with anti-windup, so I found https://www.scilab.org/pid-anti-windup-schemes https://www.scilab.org/pid-anti-windup-schemes that seems to cover the concept reasonably well. It's one of the fundamental techniques to get PIDs to work properly IRL. I can't find it right now, but I remember having a cheat sheet with a lot of tricks to make PIDs work properly. As a control engineer you learn a lot of fancy techniques, of which you usually only use a few, but practical PID control is sadly not taught in most courses because it's basically a collection of hacks. If you know a little bit more about the system's behavior you can usually precalculate the optimal inputs and use the PID only for course correction, that often yields much better responses than what you can achieve with a controller alone. If your system is nonlinear, it might be useful to use gain scheduling to adapt the PID parameters to the setpoint region you're operating in. Switching behaviors in the system can also mess up your responses. Sometimes your system has a vibrating frequency that can lead to resonance in your control. You may need to filter that, too, maybe even with a sliding frequency window. E.g. when controlling a gearbox attached to a motor, you don't want to actuate at the motor's vibrating frequency. >smoothing functions that reduce overshooting the response also add some delay to the time taken It's not so surprising if you think about what a low pass filter does. By filtering out the high frequencies the response becomes more sluggish, meaning that your input to the PID is already delayed. This means your PID reacts more slowly.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoTo quote taleb (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1533067876671885312 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1533067876671885312): "...while I've seen gluts not followed by squeezes, I've never seen a squeeze not followed by a glut."
- ReptileMan 4y agoProbably was even true for whale oil when people moved to kerosene out of price and availability. It was because nobody was buying, but still a glut.
- info781 4y agoConstruction industry seems to still be short everything, doors ,windows all those parts needed to build a house.
- jpster 4y agoSeems doubtful this will last, given the rapidly decelerating housing market.
- deelowe 4y agoWhen is the last time you checked? Lumber tanked over a month ago.
- markdown 4y agoWhat a strange sentence. What does your construction industry do if not "construct" those things? Have they devolved to just being lego builders that glue together the work of others?
- henryteeare 4y agoAre you of the “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” persuasion?
- coding123 4y agoNot that far, but I would need to buy an apple tree from someone and wheat seeds
- 6c737133 4y ago
- vidanay 4y agoMaybe I can get a container for farm storage for cheap now.
- joshu 4y agosame, but racecars/tires
- aliqot 4y agoyou can get them brand new delivered on site for 2-3k last I looked into it.
- eeemmmooo 4y agoWhere do you buy them?
- aliqot 4y agohttps://shipped.com/shipping-containers-for-sale.php https://shipped.com/shipping-containers-for-sale.php Just punch in your zip. I can get a 20 footer now for 2k.
- KirillPanov 4y agoThank you so much for this. For some reason, shipping containers are unlike every other market... sellers refuse to advertise their prices! Take a look on craigslist: nearly every ad either has a fake price ($1, $1000, $999,999) or else says "call for pricing". The only place I've seen with real prices is a printed-on-dead-trees farmer's newspaper. That website is what is so hard to find: straightforward pricing updated regularly. I need a shipping container at some point in the next year but I'm in no hurry. Now I can just check this site every week or so to get a feel for when prices have bottomed. Anybody know why the container market has such weirdly opaque pricing? It's a nearly-ideal commodity...
- 8ig8 4y agoIs there a global index for second-hand container pricing? Is it time to low ball the sellers I see on Craigslist for some extra storage?
- dukeofdoom 4y agoA good time to build a container home perhaps
- postalrat 4y agoWhere do I buy these cheap containers in Minnesota?
- orangepurple 4y agoDouble check what poisons they are sprayed with
- samus 4y agoAnd what was shipped inside
- db48x 4y agoContainers make terrible homes. They are engineered for a specific use, which makes them difficult to adapt to other uses.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoThe company I work for did all the steel work and painting to build this: https://www.gatewaycontainersales.com.au/shipping-container-wine-tasting-centre-in-tasmania/ https://www.gatewaycontainersales.com.au/shipping-container-... Which is kinda cool. I agree, they are a really poor choice for home construction though.
- db48x 4y agoI think those pictures illustrate several of the reasons you shouldn’t repurpose shipping containers into buildings. The buildings are, quite frankly, ugly. And that useless diagonal bit is really stupid. The tower for looking out over the beautiful country–side is a nice touch, but its square, blocky shape limits you to looking in four directions, making it quite inelegant. The nicest part of this project is probably the outdoor seating, and all you did there was plonk down a picnic table on some gravel. I’ve seen worse picnic tables though, so you get a few points there. I would have arranged for the courtyard to have an unobstructed view on one side, looking down the hill towards the orchard, but at least some of the tables have a view.
- paulmd 4y agoThis is textbook "bullwhip effect" stuff. Everyone was over-ordering because the leadtime was forever... now everyone's stuff is coming through and they're canceling because they don't need 5 years of supply delivered next week. Every layer of the supply chain (consumer products, product assembly, component procurement, shipping, component production, materials shipment, materials production, labor, etc) produces a stronger and stronger echo of its demand shocks on its suppliers, and then suddenly it stops and reverses and gluts just as strongly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect It has seemed like a definite possibility for a long time with the covid demand... let alone with the Fed actively trying to crush consumers until they can't afford to consume to produce a second-order effect of forcing corporations to halt their price-increase-spiral. Of course you can never predict the exact moment the flip will happen (and it happens progressively across the economy of course), it's the old "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent in a short position", but, yeah, I've been saying this for like a year now and I'm nobody particularly special in that respect. Hopefully we will see microcontrollers/power+display ICs, Raspberry Pis, and [housing] building materials come down soon. Those have remained stubbornly short despite the glut in consumer-facing electronic products and leading-edge ICs. Fab space is going to be another interesting one too, everyone was super hot on building their own fabs for those embedded things, and while I think there's a strategic interest in that continuing, there is going to be some tough times ahead for the commercial operators - especially TSMC, they are the one company where the margins have undeniably and conspicuously soared over the past few years. You've already seen pullback in planned increases to DRAM and actual cuts to flash production... and I doubt there's any particular product that is going to surge and take up that capacity right now either. > After analyzing 2023 supply and demand in the memory market, due to a conservative demand outlook, DRAM and NAND Flash look to be greatly oversupplied in each quarter and inventory pressure will continue to accelerate in 1H23. In the DRAM sector, after Micron led the way to announce a DRAM production reduction plan that will fall far below historical levels of supply-side bit growth, the 2023 DRAM Sufficiency Ratio will contract from the 11.6% previously forecast by TrendForce to less than 10%, helping to alleviate rapidly deteriorating inventory pressure. However, more suppliers must be relied on to join in the actual reduction of DRAM production in the future in order to reverse the supply and demand imbalance next year. https://www.techpowerup.com/299555/micron-and-kioxia-are-cutting-back-on-dram-and-nand-manufacturing-volumes https://www.techpowerup.com/299555/micron-and-kioxia-are-cut... > Kioxia Corporation announced production adjustments at its Yokkaichi and Kitakami flash memory plants. The company will reduce its wafer start production volume by approximately 30 percent, starting from October this year. By adjusting production in line with current market conditions, Kioxia will better manage production and sales. The company will continue to review and adjust operations as needed. https://www.kioxia.com/en-jp/about/news/2022/20220930-1.html https://www.kioxia.com/en-jp/about/news/2022/20220930-1.html
- Animats 4y agoThere never was a container shortage worldwide. There were a lot of containers in the wrong places. They were piling up in West Coast US ports and scarce in China. It was more cost-effective to take ships back empty than filling them with empty containers to go back. Some of this was corrected by applying port fees to shippers who didn't take enough containers back. This reflects the US's lack of exports and China no longer wanting unsorted US recycling.
- seb1204 4y agoThe recycling but is interesting. I was not aware of this aspect but have heard from other nations that they no longer accept containers full of plastic rubbish.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoYeah, even in Europe this is happening at a massive scale. Romanian border checks often uncover dozens or even hundreds of tones of plastic, textile, rubber garbage and e-waste coming from countries like France, Germany and the UK, falsely marked as "recycling" or "raw materials" in the paperwork, which are definitely not recyclable or usable, but will end up in some Romanian landfill operated by some shady unscrupulous business owner who even burn the trash sometimes, causing masive air pollution. I heard the same is happening in other countries, such as Turkey. It hit me that many rich countries get their so called "green-ness" by paying poorer, more corrupt countries, to offshore their environmental damage, while globally the impact is still the same, but as long as it's not in their back yard, it counts as being green. https://euobserver.com/news/151622 https://euobserver.com/news/151622
- paganel 4y ago> operated by some shady unscrupulous business owner who even burn the trash sometimes, As a guy living in Bucharest I can confirm that unfortunately that stuff is really happening. It's kind of crazy when you think about it, i.e. the externality of regularly intoxicating about 2 million people with smoke that has the smell of some chemical trash so that some people further West can check the "we've done our part! we've recycled!" checkbox. All this while literally putting money in the Italian Mafia's pockets, as articles like this one [1] can attest to (in Romanian, but Google Translate can help). [1] https://psnews.ro/groapa-de-gunoi-de-la-glina-de-la-afacerile-cu-mafia-siciliana-la-redeschiderea-pregatita-de-udmr-focar-de-infectie-pentru-localnici-670992/ https://psnews.ro/groapa-de-gunoi-de-la-glina-de-la-afaceril...
- robocat 4y agoHere’s the measured pricing of 40’ containers: https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-expertise/world-container-index-assessed-by-drewry https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-...
- KirillPanov 4y agoI think that first graph shows the price to ship a container ("blended" over several routes), not the cost of the container itself. "Drewry’s composite World Container Index". Note that right at the moment the cost to move a container across the ocean is almost exactly the same as the cost to buy the container (see the second graph at the same url), for several routes. So it's easy to mix them up.