Shipping & General has introduced four superlinks, five days a week, which are dedicated specifically to the transport of less than container load (LCL) shipments. “The transport of LCL shipments out of Durban unpack depots has seen massive growth over the past two years and we have increasingly seen that clients are clearing their groupage consol containers and electing to transport their Johannesburg destined consignments by road, on the premise of a strict overnight door-todoor delivery,” MD Regan Moodley told FTW. A comprehensive range of local feeder vehicles and staff are on standby from sunrise daily to load these shipments and deliver them to importers, he said. Moodley is upbeat about growth on the Durban-Gauteng route, with ‘favourable’ volumes over the past year. The company moves in excess of 1 200 TEUs per month on the N3 highway, he told FTW. “We have also secured our own rail account with Transnet Freight Rail, enabling us to offer a merchant road haulage service out of the City Deep terminal for all containers being railed to the Johannesburg-based terminal,” he said. “With shipping lines increasingly citing local cartage as non-core, we are quickly filling this void.” He said that this was different from the somewhat controversial trend to unpack full, cleared containers in Durban and the subsequent road haulage of containers as breakbulk freight to Johannesburg. “Clearing and forwarding agents often opt for this in an effort to save the empty redirection costs imposed by shipping lines,” said Moodley, adding that if one calculated the costs of cross-haulage in Durban, as well as the costs to unpack, it was not cost-effective. “The Durban unpack concept is really only viable when clients consolidate their payloads from multiple containers and then maximise the payloads by using fewer trucks to transport the shipment,” he said. INSERT & CAPTION Currently moving in excess of 1 200 TEUs per month on the N3 highway. – Regan Moodley
