"Our ability to offer a comprehensive, digitalised transportation service is crucial for our customers"

The crisis first hit China in mid-February, which is a very busy time because of the Chinese New Year. At that point, only Chinese factories shut down. When China was reopening production facilities a month later, major global importers were forced to shut down their own operations because the pandemic had reached Europe and America. We are now seeing things return to normal, as our CEO Rodolphe Saadé has explained (FR).

The lockdown in Europe and the US caused a sudden drop in consumer spending in many sectors. Our customers asked us to hold onto goods they had ordered, because they were unable to sell their existing inventories. Firstly, we had to adjust our capacity to deal with the overall fall in demand. It was in order to meet these new requirements that the CMA CGM Group launched the BUSINESS CONTINUITY PACK, with innovative solutions such as DELAY IN TRANSIT – which enables shippers to store their freight in one of our port hubs to delay the flow of goods – air freight solutions for urgent goods, and services to support our customers’ businesses. For example, our Networking Intermediation Services have been very successful: they are helping our customers find new customers or suppliers and reach new markets by giving them access to our own client portfolio.

As Rodolphe Saadé has said, we are moving towards a reconfiguration of global trade, with increasing demand for more sustainable transportation and increasing regionalised trade patterns. Our Group is fully aligned with these future developments, working on more environmentally friendly modes of transport, both on long-haul routes with 23,000-TEU container ships powered by liquefied natural gas (LNG), and short-sea routes.

The main lesson for our customers is that it is in their interests to have integrated, end-to-end transportation solutions that give them enough flexibility to manage their freight in great detail. That’s why we are developing joint services with CEVA, and that’s why the Group has embarked on a large-scale effort to digitalise its tools. Our customers want to be able to monitor their goods and take action at every stage of the transport process. In 2020, our ability to offer a comprehensive, digitalised transportation service is crucial for our customers.

Global trade will continue to develop, but in a different way. There will be adjustments. Manufacturers will want to diversify their sourcing and limit the risk of their supply chains breaking down. We will see some reshoring of “strategic” production, particularly in the medical sector, although this will probably be marginal. It will not have any major impact on the development of global trade, on companies’ desire to conquer new markets or on overall demand for transportation. In the circumstances, shipping represents the most environmentally friendly alternative, and we expect its role in trade to continue growing, particularly at the intraregional level.

Marc Bourdon joined the CMA CGM Group in 1999 in the Hong Kong regional office, where he was head of commercial development for Southeast Asia and then for Central and Northern China. He became head of several Group agencies in 2004, particularly in India, then in Brazil in 2010, in the US in 2013 and finally in China in 2018. In January 2020, after Mathieu Friedberg was appointed head of CEVA Logistics, he became the Group’s Senior Vice President, in charge of the sales and commercial agencies network.