Prime Freight’s summary of a February 2022 report by The Loadstar. Read the original for the full story.
In February 2022, shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine, The Loadstar reported a warning that a war could hit global container supply chains far beyond the Black Sea.
Speaking at a FreightWaves conference, Vespucci Maritime’s Lars Jensen said Black Sea container trade was relatively small, but sanctions on Russia were likely and Russia might respond with cyber-attacks; the US and UK had recently warned of a higher risk of such attacks. He recalled the 2017 NotPetya attack, which took down Maersk’s systems for about two weeks and cost the carrier around $300 million.
In 2017 the market had enough spare capacity to absorb the loss of the world’s largest carrier for a while. In early 2022 there was effectively no buffer, so a similar attack could have a far bigger effect on supply chains. Jensen thought higher oil prices would matter less to container shippers, because freight rates were already so high that a bunker surcharge increase of a few hundred dollars per box would barely register.
What it meant for shippers
The warning was about resilience more than geography: when the market has no spare capacity, an outage at one large carrier or port spreads quickly. Having fallback options across carriers and routings is a common way to reduce that exposure.