Wholesale Healthy/Unhealthy Competition? - Ancient Wisdom

Greetings from Spain

August is over, now the month of September unfolds, who knows what will happen.

Last week I was telling you about a fraud alert and how Ringo (our man in Indonesia loaded) two 40ft containers in one night, working through the night because of the heat.

If you missed it you can read about it here.

Coco (our girl in China) doesn't like to be beaten..

Tomas is here in Spain! He is officially on holiday.. but nothing could stop him from visiting our Spain company (AW Artisan) and connecting face to face with the team. Of course he connects every day online, but actual bonding matters. We went for dinner last night.. and invited anyone in the company who wanted to to join us after work.. Only slightly surprisingly... Everyone made it.. in honor of Tomas I guess. They like parties in Spain. Anyway we had to celebrate a record month, and targets smashed.

Tomas on the left and Toni (Spain manager) on the right.

Tomas is the main man at our Slovak company, so as you can imagine there is a lot of healthy competition between the two teams and Tony and Tomas.. but in a good hearted way.

You have probably read about the supply chain problems, in India, China and Indonesia there is a huge shortage of containers. In the trade jargon they call it "Equipment" - for reasons that are beyond me all the containers in the world have ended up in the wrong spots at the wrong times, not enough equipment, not enough slots on ships, not enough drivers.. resulting in massive price hikes for the capacity that is available. Why is it taking so long to sort this out? The latest news from shipping companies is that rates are expected to keep rising.

I think something deeply dodgy could be going on.. the world's shipping is in the hands of only about four or five mega companies..

1 Maersk Line with 708 ships - based in Denmark and basically the countries biggest company and tax payer
2 Mediterranean Shipping Company with 589 ships - privately owned family controlled Swiss company. Secretive?
3 CMA CGM with 566 ships French owned with plenty of allegedly dodgy dealing in the past and is run by a family with Lebanese and Syrian origin. (google search)
4 COSCO with 498 ships, it is also known as: China Ocean Shipping Company, and ultimately (most likely) controlled by the CCP.

My friend Alan is Danish and owns a few shares in Maersk, if the rumors around Copenhagen are correct they are making obscene amounts of money and struggling to invest/hide the loot. Shares have increased over 100% recently.. but do the maths..

If the old price of shipping containers was about €650 (this is what the shipping part of the costs was) and they could make a profit on this.. imagine their profit margin when they can charge €12,000 per container.

These companies control more than half of all container capacity and practically all of the East / West routes. Is it possible that normal competitive markets are broken?

One hopes that healthy competition will normalize the market soon, or else governments will step in to do something, because ultimately we all pay these increased costs.

Anyway we had been fighting for weeks to even secure containers, when strangely all of a sudden we were able to book what we wanted.. hence Ringo loading two in one night and more the following nights.

Coco was offered four containers.. if she could load them the same day. All a bit feast or famine.

We have a small warehouse in Yiwu, China which can just about hold four containers of stock at a push.. so things were desperate stock loaded to the rafters.

It's a lot of work, admin, checking, decision making, packing list and invoices with all the paperworks have to be put together on the same day..

Coco called me excited and exhausted after an epic day. She sent me lots of pictures.. an all time record for container loading at AW. and maybe she was just a bit pleased to beat Ringo :)

That's healthy competition..

Hopefully the stock will be in the UK in four or five weeks in time for Christmas.. but only just..

We are working hard to bring you supplies, and not just from China.. shipments on the way from India and Nepal also.. plus we are working hard to produce new and exciting products from the UK aromatics factory.

We are far from perfect at AW - we are often behind with orders, often out of stock, sometimes things go wrong, but at the end of the day we love gifts (and our customers) and try our best to be authentic.

But the tradeshow is back on in Birmingham.. exciting to see life getting back to normal. Regular readers will know that we don't exhibit at trade shows, but if you have the chance you should go, many very good companies will be there including our good friends Puckator and Something Different. In a trade show all those companies head to head should provide you with some healthy competition.

AW doesn't have sales people or do trade shows, so maybe you have to work a little harder to place an order, but I believe you will see the difference in your bottom line...

Take care, have a nice weekend whatever you do, and don't forget to be kind to someone.

David