1956 On April 26th, Newark Port, New Jersey, USA, under the attention of 100 guests, a crane loaded 58 containers (also called containers) into a cargo ship named Idea-X in turn. This cargo ship belongs to Marcon McClane, an entrepreneur who is a truck driver. A container was loaded in less than seven minutes. A few hours later, the ship left the port and arrived at the southern port of Houston five days later. The world revolution led by containers has quietly begun.
Before the popularization of containers, most goods were loaded and unloaded from ships by hand. Even if more forklifts and mechanical equipment are introduced, the daily life of dock workers is still hard and dangerous. The statistics of new york in the early 1950s showed that the disability rate of workers was three times that of construction workers and eight times that of other ordinary jobs.
Due to the slow loading and unloading speed, cargo ships spend 50% of their time at the port and only half of their time at sea.
Container, a standardized metal box, seems inconspicuous, but it suddenly improves the efficiency of mechanical loading and unloading.
Before 1956, the loading and unloading cost of a medium-sized cargo ship in the United States was about $5.83 per ton. After the first container loading and unloading, the loading and unloading cost per ton dropped to 15.8 cents, the efficiency was improved by more than 30 times, and the time was greatly shortened.
Due to the reduction of loading and unloading time, cargo ships now sail at sea for 90% of the time.
Containers have also reduced the damage and theft of goods, and the insurance premium has dropped by more than 80%. The reduction in the number of workers has also reduced the interference of strikes on shipping.
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Rene Borruey, a French historian, commented at that time: "Containers are just a new evolution of the mode of transportation that has been used since the beginning of the 20th century.
American historian Donald Fitzgerald said, "This is not a revolution. Containerization in the 1950s was only a chapter in the history of navigation. " .
From a local point of view, what they said is undoubtedly correct.
But McClane's insight lies in his realization that it is necessary to speed up the development of shipping and solve the bottleneck of loading and unloading goods. To solve this bottleneck, we need containers, but we also need to cooperate with the establishment of the entire ecosystem of container operation: the operation of ports, cranes, warehouses, trucks, trains and fleets.
The most important thing here is the standardization of each link.
Maclean opened his container design patent to the outside world and worked tirelessly to promote industry standardization. 15 years later, he owned the largest shipping company in the world.
When the whole ecosystem is completed, its subsequent development far exceeds the imagination of all the people in it, even including McLean, the pioneer of promoting containers.
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In the late 1950s, Benjamin Chinitz, an economist at Harvard University, was studying the impact of containers on new york's economy and predicted that it would be beneficial to new york's industrial production economy. His main logic is that compared with the northeast and midwest of the United States, new york is on the coast, and it will be cheaper to transport goods to the south of the United States.
Clothing production was the largest part of new york's economy at that time. Chinitz believes that it will not be affected by the reduction of transportation costs.
Like Otawa Chinitz, the mainstream economist at that time, he only saw the little things he cared about. They did not expect at all, and refused to accept that the popularization of containers would greatly reduce transportation costs and lead to the possibility of a comprehensive division of labor in the global economy. Capital will seek the lowest price scheme, and the high cost will eventually be abandoned.
The popularity of containers has reduced the freight from anywhere in the world to the United States, and most traditional industrial production economies in the United States, including new york, have been destroyed because of high prices.
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Official website of Danish Maersk, the world's largest shipping company, shows that the freight from Asia to Europe on 20 15 is: a flat-screen TV, 2 dollars; A pair of shoes, 1 1 cent; T-shirt, 4 cents; Tablet computer, 5 cents.
20 15 1 1 month, a 40-foot container was transported from Shenzhen to the Netherlands. At the cheapest time, the freight was only 300 yuan, barely covering manpower and material resources, and there was money to buy a road through the Suez Canal. This freight can be viewed from another angle: if you want to travel around the world for a year, it may be cheaper to put your personal belongings on the container of the ship than in the local storage warehouse.
The low freight rate brought by containers has produced some seemingly incredible new cooperative relationships:
If you catch fish in Scotland, it will be shipped to China in containers for processing, and then the cost will be lower than that in Scotland.
According to the statistics of the World Bank in 2002, the transportation cost from the coast of China to the inland is three times that from China to the United States.
It is cheaper for South China to import soybeans from the United States than to buy soybeans from the Northeast, because the freight for a meal of soybeans from the United States to China is only about $20.
The biggest beneficiary of container technology is the "just-in-time manufacturing" industrial model represented by Toyota in the 1980s. Toyota outsources the production of most parts to suppliers. The two sides signed a long-term contract, and the supplier promised to deliver the parts to Toyota quickly in a short time window.
A substantial reduction in transportation costs will enable Toyota to find the cheapest and best partner in the world, greatly reducing production costs and inventory.
Some analysts pointed out that during the 30 years from the mid-1980s to the present, due to the globalization of container-driven supply chains, the global stock of non-agricultural products has decreased by one trillion dollars. The reduction of inventory means that the burden on manufacturers is reduced, and the interest saved here is at least $80 billion a year.
The reduction of these costs will eventually reduce the price of products and benefit the end consumers all over the world.
Today, two-thirds of the world's container transport goods are parts and semi-finished products in the supply chain.
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Another major effect of containers is to limit the bargaining power of low-skilled workers.
In the new global division of labor situation, if your skills can be easily replaced, then you are actually competing with the workers of all cargo ships in the world and fighting price wars.
According to the statistics of the World Bank, the proportion of employees' income in national income in developed countries has been reduced from about 65% in 1980 to 58% in 20 10.
According to Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute, an American NGO, from 1979 to 20 13, excluding inflation, the median hourly wage of Americans only increased by 6. 1%. The hourly wages of people whose income is 10% (meaning that only 10% people earn less than them) have dropped by 5.3%.
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From 1985 to 20 12, the global container traffic basically increased at an annual growth rate of 10%.
In 20 14, among the ten container ports with the largest throughput in the world, except for Singapore, Busan and Dubai, the other seven were all in China. Shanghai Port, with the largest throughput, has 35 million TEU (twenty-foot TEU), which is about twice that of Hong Kong, which has the largest throughput in the world at 200 1 year.
But behind the huge and fast-growing figures, ironically, the whole shipping industry has suffered serious periodic losses.
The other side of standardization is the lack of differentiation. When the competition becomes fierce, there is only a price war. The pioneers of the industry have no advantage.
Drewry, an analysis company, estimates that the entire shipping industry will lose $5 billion collectively in 20 16 due to price competition.
In the shipping industry, the most direct way to reduce the unit transportation cost is to build larger ships. The volume of the world's largest container ship has increased from 1000 TEU in the early 1960s to 18000 TEU now. The improvement of carrying capacity is a double-edged sword. When the economy rises, it makes a lot of money, and when the economy falls, the fierce price war may lead to the bankruptcy of some companies.
R.J. Reynolds, an American tobacco company, once invested in Sea Land, the first company of Marcon McClane, a pioneer in shipping, but all of them withdrew in 1980s due to serious losses. In a letter to shareholders, its executives explained that shareholders of tobacco companies are not the kind of investors who are interested in "asset-oriented and cyclical" industries.
McLean's second company, United States Line (USL), ordered 14 energy-saving but slow cargo ships at a unit price of 750 million US dollars during the oil crisis in the early 1980s. He underestimated the excess capacity of the industry. After the oil price dropped to 14 USD per barrel in 1985, his fuel-efficient cargo ship lost its competitiveness because of its slow speed. Finally, the company was unable to bear the debt of $1200 million, and declared bankruptcy and reorganization on 19861/month. This was the biggest bankruptcy case in American history at that time.
USL's 52 cargo ships and 1 10,000 containers around the world were finally seized and auctioned by creditors. McClane's stock assets in USL have also been emptied. He never really recovered from this bankruptcy and died in May 20001at the age of 87.
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Today, 60 years later, have various new standardized technologies similar to containers quietly emerged?
It seems unremarkable, but its long-term development far exceeds everyone's imagination?
Will this make all unimaginative economists feel ashamed?
Will it make most people engaged in this technology busy in vain, but make most people's lives richer and better in unexpected places?