We’ve discussed some of the findings and recommendations made by Ryan Petersen of Flexport with regard to the West Coast seaport snarl-ups. I see that the company, which defines itself as a digital freight forwarder, is going to be hiring quite a few people–list of openings at their website:
https://www.flexport.com
The company says that many of the jobs, especially those in sales and software development, do not require specific logistics experience.
Interesting that these jobs…at least, the sample I looked at…don’t have the remote-work option that is now a pretty popular option.
That’s a pretty long list. 325 openings would make a fair sized company by itself. The great majority that I looked at were for software developers variously described.
All the news articles talk about “west coast” port backlogs. Most also give the impression that these ships waiting off LA/Long Beach have been waiting for weeks or even months.
I keep meaning to do a dive into it but get distracted by work evrry time I do.
What I have found is that the backlog is not “West coast Ports” in general. Oakland, Portland, SF, Seattle all have no backlog at all. Oakland has a fair amount of excess capacity at the moment.
San Diego has no backlog but has a problem in that it can’t handle the larger container ships. While the other ports on the West Coast can handle 50 foot+ drafts, San Diego can only handle 35′.
Acapulco in Mexico is down from 1.3mm metric tons to .73mm metric tons from last year so sounds like it should have some excess capacity. It is not that big or deep but still, not particularly congested it seems.
The other thing the press misleads on is waiting times. Reading the media, one gets the impression that ships are waiting multiple weeks or even months at LA/LB. Actual waiting time is currently 8.5 days.
This is not to say that the LA/LB congestion is not a serious problem in need of assistance. It is to point out that the media do us a disservice through inaccurate reporting.
Is it a “lie” to say that west coast ports in general have capacity problems? One might defend the media by saying it is not a lie, just sloppy reporting from a bunch of 20 somethings who do not know their ass from their elbo or a container ship from a rowboat.
It still does us a major disservice.
I do like the posts and commentary on supply chain issues here on CB. Very knowledgable and well informed.
John Henry
Port of Los Angeles has a dashboard with various statistics….showing average anchorage time of 18 days, based on 30-day rolling average plus a container dwell time which looks to average somewhere around 8 days:
https://signal.portoptimizer.com/
https://kentico.portoflosangeles.org/getmedia/a9af147a-ace7-4f27-9b2f-b25ecb73dc30/import-container-dwell-report
…JH, what is the source of the 8.5 day number?…could things have improved that much if you look at, say, the last week or so vs the 30-day average?