As advised by our industry body, CBFCA, the following article has been written by Sohee Kim & Kyunghee Park for Bloomberg and is forwarded for your attention.
“As reported in Bloomberg today Hanjin Shipping Co. will apply for court receivership after lenders decided to halt all support to South Korea’s biggest container shipping line.
The Hanjin board decided unanimously on the move at a meeting in Seoul Wednesday and will file for receivership this afternoon, a spokesman said. The restructuring proposals submitted by Hanjin Shipping weren’t enough to address a cash shortage, main lender Korea Development Bank said Tuesday, dealing a blow to the revival efforts by a firm that’s been trying to reschedule debt under a voluntary creditor-led program since May.
Hanjin is among shipping lines grappling with a slump in global trade since the 2008 financial crisis and the slowest pace of economic growth in China in a quarter century. The industry worldwide has been forced to sell assets, cut jobs and idle some operations to bolster finances as the slowdown coupled with overcapacity eroded freight rates.”
In other places such as Canada, service providers in rail and road, for example CN Rail, has put a 24 hour “pause period” on all Hanjin containers and is waiting for further information from Hanjin. The CBFCA is aware that containers that are on the train are being moved but Hanjin containers not on trains are not being loaded to rail. In addition, in terminals, Hanjin containers are not being released during the “pause period”.
It is not improbable that such actions could occur within Australia, and the CBFCA recommends members review consignment issues in Hanjin carriage and inform clients of issues which have arisen in other places and could arise in Australia.
GPSM will continue to monitor the situation and advise any updates as received. We are currently checking all shipments that are on the water and booked to move to Australia to check that none of our routed containers are on Hanjin vessels, they may have been booked on anther shipping line but due to the consortiums operating from Far East and South East Asia, carriers do slot charter on other lines vessels as required.