The Freight Transport Association (FTA) has said that action by the European Commission on pricing rules for shipping lines will bring the industry into the 21st century.
New legislation on General Rate Increases (GRIs), recently adopted by the Commission, follows a three-year EU investigation into price signalling by the shipping lines.
The Commission noted that 14 container liner shipping companies have regularly announced GRIs with regard to freight on their websites, through the press or in other ways.
These announcements are usually made three to five weeks before their intended implementation date.
During that time, some or all of the other carriers announce similar intended rate increases for the same route or similar routes. Carriers are not bound by the increases they announce and there is evidence that some of them may align their rates with those announced by other companies.
Carriers involved included China’s COSCO, Taiwan’s Evergreen, Denmark’s Maersk and Germany’s Hamburg Süd and Hapag-Lloyd.
The Commission has raised concerns over the practice of price signalling, which it said could allow companies to co-ordinate their behaviour and may have increased prices on the market for container liner shipping services on routes to and from Europe.
Following the EU investigation, the shipping lines have agreed to significantly change their pricing behaviour and to cease publishing GRI announcements.
The commitments which they have provided have now been made legally binding by the Commission for three years starting on 7 December 2016.
Welcoming the move, the FTA’s Chris Welsh said: “This new ruling will bring transparency to pricing in the liner shipping industry and will hopefully remove the need for our members to resort to court proceedings for competition damages.”
