Greetings,
All of us in the used imported vehicle industry know that nothing is “normal” of late…99% of what we face in the course of daily business has been affected by COVID.
We are lucky in NZ to have a relatively “normal” environment that’s not affected by COVID , and this unfortunately causes some complacency among us as to what is happening globally – and this does affect us here…
Currently, there is a global shipping shortage.
Containerised vehicle shipping is all but non-existent to the new and used vehicle suppliers, as there is a global shortage of containers for general freight movement.
This in turn is putting pressure on the finite number of RORO vessels available for shipping vehicles.
New vehicle order backlogs aren’t helping either – we just saw a few days ago that Toyota NZ has over 10,000 cars awaiting shipping to NZ. We know other brands have similar backlogs too.
While the shipping lines Autohub uses (and has done for 15 + years) own some of their vessels, from time to time they need to charter additional vessels to cope with demand.
Right now, due to demand being high, vessel owners have changed the terms of charter dramatically.
Many vessels are now double the price (or more) to charter with minimum 12 month Charter terms being the minimum period.
We are in constant dialog with our shipping partners, but the cold hard truth is shaping up to be “you will have to pay extra to cover our increasing costs, or we can’t ship cars for you in the numbers you require (or possibly at all)”.
Right now, shipping lines are looking at their business strategy and costs for the rest of this year and we expect to have soon, indications of revised shipping costs shortly.
Please get prepared for shipping costs to increase as we believe it is inevitable.
We will announce any changes to shipping package prices once the shipping lines have advised us of any cost increases going forward.
Team Autohub.