This podcast is a new home for anyone with a professional interest in international trade, shipping, procurement, logistics and air cargo. Each episode your host, award-winning journalist Mike King, will be speaking to leading decision-makers, analysts, journalists, operators and shippers to get their take on current freight and logistics markets and the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Latest Episodes

Intra-Asia Container Trades, Port Congestion and Rising Rates, with Elaine Low, Area Managing Director, Southeast Asia, Maersk

October 6, 2026 richard 00:15:24 Comments Off

Mike King travels to Maersk's Southeast Asia head office in Singapore to talk with Elaine Low, Area Managing Director for Southeast Asia at A.P. Moller-Maersk, about the intra-Asia container trades. It's the world's biggest container trade, and one that rarely gets the attention it deserves, even with Drewry's Intra-Asia...

Reimagine Your Supply Chain First, Then Add the Technology, with e2open’s Pawan Joshi

October 1, 2026 richard 00:18:53 Comments Off

In this extended clip from The Freight Buyers' Club, Pawan Joshi, Chief Strategy Officer at e2open, digs into how far AI has actually taken supply chains, and where the real opportunity still sits. Pawan explains that a lot of supply chain processes and company structures were designed decades ago, in...

Can Dubai’s Ports Ever Recover From the Hormuz Crisis?

September 29, 2026 richard 00:09:15 Comments Off

an Dubai's ports ever recover from the Hormuz closure? Mike King and Drewry port specialist Eleanor Hadland analyse the region's shifting maritime landscape. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced a rethink of logistics across the Middle East. With global trade routes under constant pressure, this episode...

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Since being on the Freight Buyers’ Club I have been receiving great responses!

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Founder, Kalalou

…insightful initial contribution to the industry’s public discourse

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Board Member, Executive Advisor & Ex-World Economic Forum Director of Supply Chain

Important conversations at a critical moment for global trade.

Jeffrey Shih

CEO, Dimerco Express Group

Such insightful speakers and great content, Mike. You are one of my essential listens!

Brandon Fried

Executive Director, The Airforwarders Association

I loved, loved loved this last podcast. So good to just learn more about how your area operates but also to hear perspectives.

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Supply Chain Expert, USAF Veteran

Topical, timely and an awesome cast of experts.

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Latest Videos

The Freight Buyers' Club

6.2K subscribers

In this extended interview from Air Cargo Unpacked, retiring Airforwarders Association Executive Director Brandon Fried looks back on a career that started almost by accident: a relative in the forwarding business, warehouse work, fine art logistics, legal document delivery, and eventually his own operation in Washington DC before joining AfA.

Brandon reflects on what he's most proud of: helping build the modern cargo security framework in the wake of the Pan Am 103 bombing, working with the TSA and Customs and Border Protection to create the Known Shipper Program and canine screening. Neel Jones Shah, who worked alongside Brandon from both the airline and forwarder side, pays tribute to his impact on the industry. Brandon also shares his biggest concern for the future of air freight forwarding (uncertainty and poorly informed regulation, "you're either at the table or you're on the menu"), and his message to whoever succeeds him: stay engaged with companies of every size, not just the big ones. And yes, he confirms his next title: Vice President of Lunch.

From The Freight Buyers' Club Podcast.

#AirCargo #FreightForwarding #AviationSecurity #Logistics #SupplyChain

YouTube Video VVVOVE1CZnFjbzV1U1J3VXY5WDdZUHV3LkliUmZzcGV2Qktn

Brandon Fried: 45 Years in Air Cargo, the Pan Am 103 Legacy, and Retiring as 'VP of Lunch'

Mike King is in Singapore with Elaine Low, Area Managing Director for Southeast Asia at A.P. Moller-Maersk, to look at the intra-Asia container trades. It's the biggest container trade in the world, but one that gets surprisingly little media coverage, even with Drewry's Intra-Asia Container Index at three-year highs.
Elaine explains what she sees driving demand. Asian manufacturers, not just Chinese ones, are expanding across the region rather than into the US and Europe, while fast-growing consumer markets such as the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam are absorbing more product. She points to automotive and EVs, electronics and the semiconductor ecosystem around Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan as key industries behind the growth.
On the supply side, she argues the real bottleneck is landside infrastructure at Southeast Asia's hundreds of smaller ports, and says every port in the region is effectively full. She explains how Maersk's Gemini hub-and-spoke network, with its 90% reliability target and Tanjung Pelepas as a major transshipment hub, has helped it adapt to typhoons and geopolitical disruption. She also covers how Maersk balances contract and spot demand, how surcharges have been handled, and what being an integrator means for shippers in Asia.
#Maersk #IntraAsia #ContainerShipping #PortCongestion #SoutheastAsia #Gemini #Shipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub

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Maersk on Intra-Asia Demand, Port Congestion and the Gemini Network

Elaine Low, Area Managing Director for Southeast Asia at Maersk, gives her view on peak season and what's driving air cargo out of the region.

She says peak season is getting harder to call. The traditional August-to-October window is blurring, and some industries have been in peak mode all year because of ongoing disruption. She also says trouble on the ocean side has brought charter enquiries back in recent weeks, though she sees this as demand and supply at work rather than a classic peak.

On the drivers, she describes two kinds of air buyers in Southeast Asia. The first are regular shippers in semiconductors, technology and pharma, and she estimates semicon moves roughly 80% by air. The second are shippers who switch from ocean to air when congestion puts deadlines at risk. She adds that solar has been a big mover into the US and Europe over the last three months, that tariff changes are shaping what goes by air and what goes by ocean, and that e-commerce is largely a China story rather than a Southeast Asian one.

A longer conversation with Elaine is coming next week on The Freight Buyers' Club.

#Shorts #AirCargo #Maersk #SoutheastAsia #PeakSeason #Semiconductors #Pharma #Solar #FreightBuyersClub #Dimerco

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Maersk Air Cargo: Peak Season and What's Driving Southeast Asia

#SupplyChain #ArtificialIntelligence #Logistics
In this extended clip from The Freight Buyers' Club, Pawan Joshi, Chief Strategy Officer at e2open, digs into how far AI has actually taken supply chains, and where the real opportunity still sits.
Pawan explains that a lot of supply chain processes and company structures were designed decades ago, in a world before the internet, before cell phones, when even desktop computing was limited. Technology has moved on dramatically since then. His point is that the real opportunity isn't just adding AI on top of existing processes. It's rethinking them with today's connectivity and compute in mind.
He walks through a real example: monitoring temperature in real time on a refrigerated shipping container. Catching a broken cold chain early gives a business weeks of lead time to plan around a shortage, rather than finding out only when the container arrives. He calls this closing the loop, a concept borrowed from control systems. His argument is that closing the loop matters more than which specific technology, AI included, does the work.
Pawan also explains the logic behind e2open and WiseTech's CargoWise coming together. He breaks the supply chain into three groups: the people who make products, the people who sell them, and the people who move them. CargoWise was built for the movers, e2open for the makers and sellers, and bringing them together aims to connect the whole chain rather than stopping at the handoff points.
Finally, he addresses what actually blocks companies from sharing supply chain data across their networks. His answer: not a lack of standards, but a lack of trust.

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Reimagine Your Supply Chain First, Then Add the Technology

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Exclusive: Air One's Next Move, and the Cargo Trend to Watch in 2027

Can Dubai's ports ever recover from the Hormuz closure? Mike King and Drewry port specialist Eleanor Hadland analyse the region's shifting maritime landscape.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced a rethink of logistics across the Middle East. With global trade routes under constant pressure, this episode examines how Middle Eastern logistics are adapting to new geopolitical realities. Eleanor Hadland joins the show to break down the massive capital expenditure currently flooding into the region, including the new 434 million dollar terminal in Jeddah and the wider scramble for infrastructure investment.

Beyond the Gulf, we look at the feasibility of alternative overland routes and the long-term outlook for Dubai's port sector. If you are tracking the future of global supply chain capacity and regional port investment, this analysis provides the expert perspective you need on where the money is going and why.

This is a clip from the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club. Check us out on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

Thanks to Dimerco Express Group (https://dimerco.com/) for sponsoring the show.

Can Dubai's ports ever recover from the Hormuz closure? Mike King and port specialist Eleanor Hadland analyse the region's shifting maritime landscape.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced a rethink of logistics across the Middle East. With global trade routes under constant pressure, this episode examines how Middle Eastern logistics are adapting to new geopolitical realities. Eleanor Hadland joins the show to break down the massive capital expenditure currently flooding into the region, including the new 434 million dollar terminal in Jeddah and the wider scramble for infrastructure investment.

Beyond the Gulf, we look at the feasibility of alternative overland routes and the long-term outlook for Dubai's port sector. If you are tracking the future of global supply chain capacity and regional port investment, this analysis provides the expert perspective you need on where the money is going and why.

This is a clip from the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club. Check us out on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

Thanks to Dimerco Express Group (https://dimerco.com/) for sponsoring the show.
#StraitOfHormuz #PortInvestment #ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub

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Can Dubai's Ports Survive the Hormuz Crisis?

Brandon Fried, retiring Executive Director of the Airforwarders Association, joins Mike King and Neel Jones Shah to unpack two of the biggest pressures facing forwarders right now: cargo theft and tariffs.

US cargo theft losses are up 60% year on year to nearly $725 million, with the average theft now worth over a quarter of a million dollars as criminal gangs get more targeted about what they steal. Brandon explains how thieves have evolved into organised operations, infiltrating email systems to impersonate trucking companies and buyers, and even hijacking the tracking technology built to protect shipments, using geofencing to make a stolen load look like it's still on route. He also breaks down why state jurisdiction gaps make prosecution so difficult, and what the Airforwarders Association is doing to back the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) in the Senate.

On tariffs, Brandon's own AfA survey found 83% of forwarders reporting reduced shipping volumes, with customs delays and rising costs piling on top. He makes the case that it's not the tariffs themselves but the uncertainty in how they're rolled out that's doing the real damage to forwarders and their customers.

From the latest episode of Air Cargo Unpacked, The Freight Buyers' Club Podcast.

#AirCargo #CargoTheft #Tariffs #FreightForwarding #Logistics #SupplyChain

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Who's the Thief?": Brandon Fried on Cargo Theft, Tariffs, and the $725M Problem

Mark Chadwick, President of the Global Shippers' Association, on the more than $100 million in tariff duty refunds still owed to shippers, and the labour-intensive process of tracking it all down.

FBC clip, from the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club.

Thanks to Dimerco Express Group (https://dimerco.com/) for supporting independent journalism.

#ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub #OceanFreight #Logistics #Tariffs #GlobalTrade

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The Hidden Cost of Chasing Tariff Refunds

#AirCargo #FreightBuyersClub #SupplyChain
Peter Kerins, CEO of Magna Aviation, joins the Freight Buyers' Club to talk through where air cargo stands right now. He covers the capacity that's had to find a new home after the drop in China-EU volumes, whether Europe can absorb the cost the way the US market eventually did, and what the EU's July 1st change to low-value parcel rules has actually meant for e-commerce shippers so far. He also runs through Magna's current network, Asia into Europe, a strong Africa operation moving fresh produce out of Nairobi, five weekly US services and some ad hoc Latam flying, and where he's looking to add scheduled capacity next in Southeast Asia and South America. His peak season forecast isn't the one you'd expect either: no traditional surge, but ad hoc October bookings already running well ahead of where they'd normally sit in August.

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Magna Aviation's Peter Kerins on Air Cargo Capacity, China-EU Shifts, and Where He's Expanding Next

#SupplyChain #Excel

Pawan Joshi (Chief Strategy Officer, e2open) on the real reason Excel is holding supply chains back.

It's not that the data isn't in the system. People still download it into Excel because that's how they're used to processing it, their own individual way of thinking. But Pawan argues the real unlock only happens once you get people out of Excel altogether. That's when they can actually spend their time on resiliency, contingency planning and thinking through scenarios, instead of just wrangling spreadsheets.

Watch the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club for more on agentic AI and supply chain resilience.
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/02w9yX4sBOdZoemIOMX5iS
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agentic-ai-and-supply-chain-resilience-with-e2opens/id1668766055?i=1000788666152
🌐 Website: https://www.thefreightbuyersclub.com/podcast/agentic-ai-and-supply-chain-resilience-with-e2opens-pawan-joshi-northeasterns-nada-sanders-and-andre-simha-ex-msc/
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQXnp7cbnJk

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Why Getting People Out of Excel Unlocks Supply Chain Resilience

Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc says a lack of port investment is behind the congestion hitting shippers this year. Drewry's Eleanor Hadland isn't so sure.

From 2010 to 2025, the industry added well over half a billion TEU of capacity, while container volumes only grew by 480 million TEU over the same period. By her numbers, capacity has grown faster than demand, not slower.

Eleanor leads ports and terminals research at Drewry. Her full response is on the new episode of The Freight Buyers' Club, out now on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or at thefreightbuyersclub.com. Produced with the support of Dimerco Express Group, https://dimerco.com.
#PortCongestion #ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub #Logistics

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Port Capacity Has Grown Faster Than Container Volumes Mr Clerc

#AgenticAI #SupplyChain

Nada Sanders, Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University and author of The Human/Machine, has spent decades studying how businesses forecast risk, and years serving as an expert witness in cases involving AI vendors. In this clip she explains what that experience has taught her, and it isn't flattering to the industry.

Her clearest warning is about hidden costs. She says she can "almost guarantee" that any company buying an AI package will hit costs it didn't see coming, sometimes for things as basic as querying the algorithm a different way.

Before that, she lays out concrete practices for moving from reacting to risk to actually anticipating it. That means looking past transactional data like past orders and shipments, which only tell you what already happened, and tracking external signals instead, supplier behaviour, port congestion, weather, geopolitical events. It means building a handful of plausible future scenarios rather than betting on one forecast. And it means predefining trigger points in advance, so that when lead times jump or a supplier's reliability drops past a set threshold, the response is automatic rather than argued over after the fact.

She also walks through what her book's central argument, that this was never a contest between humans and machines, looks like in practice. At Unilever, AI handles high volume, early stage hiring screens while humans keep the final call. At Maersk and Amazon, AI tracks far more shipments, demand shifts and supplier issues than any person could process, flags anomalies and possible bottlenecks, then hands the decision, reroute or don't, to the human who understands the customer relationship.

The harder question, she says, is what changes with agentic AI, where the system doesn't just recommend, it acts. That means deciding in advance where humans still need to check in, what level of uncertainty is acceptable before escalating to a person, and just as importantly, when the AI should stop acting altogether.
Watch the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club for more from Nada Sanders, alongside Andre Simha (former digital transformation chief at MSC) and Pawan Joshi (Chief Strategy Officer, e2open), on forecasting, resilience and the future of human and AI collaboration in supply chains.

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The Professor Exposing What AI Vendors Won't Tell You

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Inside Swissport’s Ambitious M&A and E-Commerce Strategy

#AI #SupplyChain

Mike closes the episode by asking Pawan Joshi (Chief Strategy Officer, e2open), Nada Sanders (Distinguished Professor, Northeastern University) and Andre Simha (former digital transformation chief at MSC) for one genuinely positive take on technology in global trade, after an episode that covered plenty of the risks.

Pawan Joshi starts with a bigger sweep of history. Just as the printing press freed people from having to memorise everything, and the internet put data at our fingertips, he argues AI now puts processed information and knowledge at our fingertips too. His view: it isn't doom and gloom, it's the next step in an evolution we're already benefiting from, provided people stay sharp enough to judge what AI gets wrong.

Nada Sanders agrees, but adds a sharper point. As AI becomes commonplace and standardised, it stops being anyone's competitive advantage. What will actually separate companies that succeed is talent, because knowing how to combine machine intelligence with human judgement isn't something that can be easily copied.

Andre Simha brings it back to a very concrete shipping problem: people still key the same information into five or ten different systems. He argues that solving that basic inconsistency is what would actually free people up from chasing "where's my box" questions and let them focus on real customer problems. He also shares a frustrating, and pretty funny, personal story about being stuck for three days going through five different chatbots on a well known professional platform before finally reaching a human, as a warning for what bad AI implementation looks like in practice.

Watch the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club for more from Andre Simha, Pawan Joshi and Nada Sanders on disruption, resilience and technology in global supply chains.

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The Optimistic Case for AI in Global Trade

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Neel Jones Shah's Peak Season Advice: Get Creative or Get Squeezed

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DHL's 3 Predictions for Air Cargo in 2027

#ContainerShipping #ShippingIndustry #Logistics

In this clip from The Freight Buyers' Club, Andre Simha, who chaired the Digital Container Shipping Association for seven years, explains why container shipping's real problem isn't technology. It's trust.

Andre explains that getting fiercely competitive shipping lines to agree on basic data standards was hard, but achievable. Getting the industry to actually adopt those standards afterward has been much harder. He calls it a vicious circle. Everyone wants visibility, but sharing information means trusting other companies with it.

He also compares today's AI evangelists to the blockchain evangelists who pitched him the same ideas a decade ago, in some cases the same people. His test for any new technology is simple. Does it remove a real, specific manual task. If not, he's not interested.

Andre closes with the electronic bill of lading as proof of the problem. Years after the pandemic pushed hard for it, adoption still sits at only 10 to 20 percent.

Andre Simha spent nearly 39 years at MSC, the world's largest container shipping line, the last five and a half as its digital transformation chief, before stepping down this spring.

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Container Shipping's Real Problem Is Trust

When Drewry's Eleanor Hadland started in the sector, the port planning manuals used 65% stack utilisation as the norm, because peaks only happened seasonally. Now, with ultra large container vessels, a peak happens every time one arrives, and 85% is the norm instead.

That extra 20% doesn't sound like much. But it's the buffer that used to absorb a storm, or a ship stuck in the Suez Canal. Eleanor, who leads ports and terminals research at Drewry, explains on the new episode of The Freight Buyers' Club.

Full episode out now on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or at thefreightbuyersclub.com. Produced with the support of Dimerco Express Group, https://dimerco.com.
#PortCongestion #ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub #Logistics

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Why Ports Have No Buffer Left For a Crisis

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