Interview with CEO of Flexport: Supply chain crunch, modern logistics

UPS delivers the end product from a warehouse to the customer's house.

But first the company selling that product had to get thousands of units of the product from the manufacturing facility to its warehouse. Before that they had to get all of the components or raw materials for that product to the manufacturing facility. Many of those components would have been manufactured by a different company that had to get its own components and raw materials to its own facility, and on and on down the chain. And these could be huge quantities of materials that require heavy machinery to transport and a lot of coordination to make sure that's available at the right time. They can't just get dropped off at the front door like a UPS delivery.

As far as I understand it, Flexport is basically building the rails for all of the different logistics and freight companies involved in this kind of commercial shipping to talk to each other more efficiently. Apparently many of them are still using phone calls and fax machines to organize these kinds of deliveries.

And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them.

So maybe, part of the solution could be a mandate of ships to take an amount of empties?

No, that's not the root cause. The root cause seems to be a combination of cascading events that causes a deathspiral: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...

"ships bring more containers than they take with them" is a symptom, not a cause. Mandating "ships to take an amount of empties" doesn't really fix the problem because shipping companies already want the ships to fill with empties, but can't because of other factors (see chart). Forcing ships to fill ships with even more empties presumably also makes things worse, by causing ships to occupy dock space.