Shippers say independent carrier visibility can benefit market

James Hookham, the Director at the Global Shippers’ Forum (GSF) explained that much of the data that is currently available comment from a carrier position, and he said there is a need for independent data to support shippers.

“We need a spotlight on the liner shipping from a shipper’s point of view, this was the original plan when GSF and MDS Transmodal produced the definitive statistical report on the European Commissions Block Exemption on alliances, back in 2019,” said Hookham.

It is a view shared by Beacon a data company that started life in 2018 as a digital forwarder, but after receiving positive feedback on its platform Beacon’s forwarder customers, during the pandemic were more concerned about receiving independent supply chain data.

By having proprietary data shippers can build a picture on how shipping lines and forwarders are performing, which routes prove the most efficient and how to adjust logistics chains using their own data, whatever size shipper you are, according to Beacon founder and CEO Fraser Robinson.

“Beacon sits on top of the carriers and forwarders and collects data paid for by the shipper, because they want control of their own data which they can integrate into their own systems,” said Robinson.

Robinson wound up the forwarding company because he could see that there was a conflict of interest in operating a forwarder company and a data company, “you can’t sell hotels and be Trip Advisor,” he argued. The forwarding business was closed in when the independent data business for shippers was launched in 2022.

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This new business is backed by some major money, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt from Google, much of the investment comes from Silicon Valley, but there are others said Robinson and many other smaller shippers, but Beacon is a UK registered start-up, based in the UK with 23 employees.

The company currently has under 100 customers, but Robinson claims: “Every company on the planet that imports or exports goods should be using a product like Beacon. And we believe in the democratisation of technology, every company should have the same access to tech, we do not believe that the best tech should be the sole domain of the big enterprise the rich company.”

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In practice this means that Beacon charges shippers by the number of containers that they move annually.

“We have customers that move a few containers a year and we have customers who move tens of thousands per year, and we built our product with a self-service component. You could go to our website and pay a couple of hundred quid a month and use Beacon, or a lot more based on how big you are as a company, and you can go to our website upload a bunch of container numbers or airway bills and be live and up and running in, I'd say, about five minutes,” claimed Robinson.

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Building on consolidated data that the company collects Beacon has now started to accumulate port congestion data and has turned this into a monthly report.

Having developed its port congestion report Beacon is exploring the use of data to shed more light on alternative parts of supply chains, with new data sets that only a neutral observer can provide.

Meanwhile, Hookham concedes that some data analysts, notably Sea-Intelligence, “tilted” into more shipper friendly data, as a result of the pandemic, with the major disruptions and delays that spread through global supply chains driving the need to know where disruptions were happening and their knock-on effects.