Cross border e-commerce peak season with tight transportation capacity and rising freight rates!
Amazon, Wal Mart and Target once again demonstrated their strong market positions in this year's Black Five and NetOne activities in the United States.
According to the latest data, Amazon ranked first with a record sales revenue of $106.18 billion; Wal Mart ranked second with sales of 20.37 billion dollars; Apple ranks third with sales of 13.95 billion US dollars. Next are Target ($7.48 billion), eBay ($7.36 billion), and Best Buy ($6.29 billion).
It is reported that the Amazon platform offers a large number of product discounts, attracting a large number of consumers to shop crazily. During the event, global consumers purchased over 1 billion items on Amazon, of which consumers ordered over 500 million items from third-party sellers.
From this, it can be seen that cross-border e-commerce currently plays a significant role in driving global import and export of goods, but the increase in cross-border orders has also caused a shortage of logistics capacity and an increase in freight rates.
According to reports, air freight rates from China to Europe and America have increased by 50% compared to recent lows, and there is strong demand for low-priced clothing and other goods exported on e-commerce platforms. Flights to North America and via Japan are also increasing, and flights from Japan to North America have seen an increase in freight rates due to limited transportation space.
According to the International Air Cargo Price Index (TAC), the freight cost from Shanghai to North America as of November 20th was $5.94 per kilogram, an increase of 50% compared to the first week of July; The shipping cost from Shanghai to Europe is $4.64 per kilogram, an increase of 53%. Freight prices from Hong Kong to North America and Europe have increased by 32% and 37% respectively.
Air freight is transported through containers or cargo planes located under passenger planes. After the prevalence of the COVID-19 in 2020, due to the grounding of a large number of passenger flights, the freight space was reduced, coupled with the chaos of maritime transport such as container ships, freight rates soared. With the resumption of passenger flights and the normalization of maritime transportation, the supply and demand relationship of cargo space is tending to ease, and freight rates have shown a downward trend since 2022.