Peak Season Forecast: Ocean, Intermodal, Air and Trucking
Special Report
Chizhevskaya Ekaterina / Shutterstock. com
“ Regardless of whether the demand will go up two times or come back to a level of about eight weeks ago, the system is not fundamentally better than it was five years ago,” Charles van der Steene, president of Maersk North America, said at the Georgia International Trade Conference in late April.“ The sheer surge will test the system, and disruption cannot be avoided.”
Ready or not
To avoid a repeat of past breakdowns, western Class Is BNSF Railway and Union Pacific Railroad( UP) are ensuring they have sufficient staff, locomotives and equipment at critical terminals across the US.
“ The month of June is where we think that air pocket will hit [ most ],” Jon Gabriel, group vice president of intermodal at BNSF Railway, told the Journal of Commerce.“ Coming out of the Fourth of July is when what’ s being put on vessels now would all start to hit. In the months of July and August, largely speaking.”
Both BNSF and UP outlined strategies to handle the uptick in cargo, including building longer trains, combining different train types, constructing trains differently and temporarily running direct point-to-point trains into smaller markets.
“ We can react [ with ] locomotives very fast; we have 500 of them parked, ready to go,” UP CEO Jim Vena said during the Bank of America Industrials Conference on May 14.“ We had a 30 % increase in international intermodal last year, and we handled it. We’ ve built a railroad that has some capacity to be able to flex.”
Having seen success in recent years pushing hard and
fast on pricing increases when capacity tightens, container lines reacted quickly to the 90-day pause. Platts, a sister product of the Journal of Commerce within S & P Global, pegged average spot rates from Asia at $ 3,900 per FEU to the US West Coast and $ 5,000 per FEU to the East Coast as of May 20, up from $ 2,220 per FEU and $ 3,340 per FEU, respectively, in the week prior to the tariff pause.
If carriers are successful in imposing a combination of general rate increases( GRIs) and peak season surcharges( PSSs) set to take effect June 1, pricing would jump to approximately $ 6,000 per FEU to the West Coast and $ 7,000 per FEU to the East Coast. GRIs apply to all shippers regardless of size, while PSSs are only imposed on smaller shippers that don’ t have agreements with carriers prohibiting their use.
“ Coming out of the Fourth of July is when what’ s being put on vessels now would all start to hit.”
There’ s no guarantee, however, that shippers will accept the rate hikes, with most major retailers exempt from PSSs.
“ It’ s shades of 2024,” Benton Kauffman, head of trans-Pacific air and sea logistics at forwarder DSV, told the Journal of Commerce, referring to last summer, when container spot rates jumped to upward of $ 8,000 per FEU to the West Coast during acrimonious dockworker contract negotiations on the East and Gulf coasts.
16 Journal of Commerce | June 2, 2025 www. joc. com