Faced with profound changes in the global economic and trade landscape, Shanghai is accelerating its transition from being a "basically built" international shipping center to a "fully built" one. Ensuring smooth supply chains under the new situation has also become an urgent issue faced by the industry.
During the North Bund Forum, the organizing committee of the North Bund International Shipping Forum and First Financial jointly created the "NBF FLOW LIVE" live broadcast room. On October 19th, during a live broadcast with the theme of "World Economic and Trade Tides Surge, Global Shipping Breaks Waves", Professor Zhang Jieshu, Secretary General of the Shanghai International Shipping Research Center, stated that the current international shipping industry is undergoing tremendous changes, with complex economic, trade, industry, and geopolitical factors intertwined, bringing unprecedented challenges to the shipping industry. For example, the slow growth of the global economy and inflationary pressures have suppressed consumer demand, tariff fluctuations caused by trade disputes have resulted in an imbalance between supply and demand of transportation capacity, the shift of industrial chains towards coastal and friendly areas has promoted the regionalization of shipping, geopolitical conflicts have led to significant adjustments in shipping routes, and the demand for green transformation has brought greater cost pressures.
She gave an example that the Red Sea crisis led to the interruption of the Suez Canal route, and ships circumnavigating the Cape of Good Hope caused the "ton kilometer" (cargo weight multiplied by transportation distance) index to reach a historic high. "This new high is not caused by the basic factors of shipping supply and demand, but by geopolitical factors leading to circumnavigation, so it is unsustainable and also poses a significant challenge to the resilience of the entire shipping industry.
Chen Zheng, Vice President of the Shanghai International Freight Forwarders Association, added from a practical perspective that the current cross continental long-distance transportation volume has decreased by about 2%, while the demand for shipping within the region has increased by 6%, indicating a clear trend towards trade regionalization. In response to this change, Chinese companies have increased their investment in overseas warehouse construction by three times compared to before 2020. At the same time, the acceleration of semi-finished product trade and overseas factory construction has forced more logistics companies to strengthen their overseas layout. The "the Belt and Road" initiative promoted more than a decade ago has promoted a large number of logistics enterprises and freight forwarders to open up a global layout in advance, which has laid a certain foundation for the entire shipping market to better meet customer needs.
Wang Xiang, General Manager of Veson Nautical Greater China, believes that green transformation is profoundly affecting ship valuation and supply chain cost structure. Large shipowners need to leverage their capital and resource advantages to simultaneously upgrade their technological routes or enhance their management capabilities, while small and medium-sized shipowners are more inclined to choose ship design schemes that reserve space for future retrofitting, while strengthening compliance capacity building such as carbon quota management and contract negotiation. Green and low-carbon has changed from a "multiple-choice question" to a "must answer question". If we continue to observe without taking action, we will face the risk of being marginalized by the market, which also poses new challenges to the stable operation of the global supply chain.
In the face of new situations and challenges, Zhang Jieshu proposed that Shanghai should focus on several aspects during the critical stage of moving from "basic construction" to "comprehensive construction". Firstly, it is necessary to enhance the hub level. Shanghai Port has been the world's largest container port for 15 consecutive years and the most connected port for 14 consecutive years. However, there is still much work to be done in the next step, the most important of which is to improve quality and efficiency, including promoting digital and intelligent transformation while developing water to water transfer, river to sea direct transportation, and sea rail intermodal transportation. Secondly, it is necessary to improve the shipping service ecosystem. "The service capability is more important for shipping centers." To this end, Shanghai needs to gather a large number of shipping service elements and enterprises in various links of the industrial chain, cultivate cross-border logistics and information service providers, and fill the gaps in high-end services such as insurance and arbitration. In addition, we need to seize the opportunities of digitization, greening, and intelligence, and strive to achieve "overtaking" in the formulation of new technology application standards. In the process of moving towards "comprehensive construction", the right to speak is very important. Therefore, it is very important to participate in the formulation of various international rules, and even actively propose various conventions or rules.
Wu Hao, General Manager of Shanghai Global Financial Service Center of Construction Bank, elaborated on the innovative path to assist in the construction of international shipping centers from a financial perspective. He stated that in the field of trade settlement, we will rely on the internationalization process of the Chinese yuan and use blockchain technology to achieve "instant payment" for cross-border payments. We will fully leverage the advantages of Shanghai as the headquarters of CIPS (Chinese yuan cross-border payment system) and provide trade payment convenience for shipping entities such as ship owners and freight forwarders through the global network of 33 Chinese yuan clearing banks. Shanghai's unique free trade account system can also provide payment settlement and risk hedging services for domestic and foreign markets.
In terms of trade financing, Wu Hao proposed that with the improvement of relevant United Nations regulations, multimodal transport bills of lading, railway waybills and other freight documents can be used as qualified collateral to promote innovation in financial products such as letter of credit discounting. At the same time, the shipping industry is accelerating its digital transformation to achieve global seamless circulation of electronic bills of lading. In addition, ship financing requires authoritative valuation data support, while green finance needs to expand from traditional fields to "sustainable finance" and "convertible finance" to support the construction of the shipping ecosystem with more resilient, flexible, and innovative financial services.
In the current era where 'maximum certainty is uncertainty', it is crucial for Shanghai and even China's shipping industry to strengthen its international rule discourse power, promote the coordinated efforts of trade, finance, science and technology innovation, and shipping center construction, in order to build a safe and efficient supply chain system.
