Introduction-
Not long back, in 2016, the news of one South Korean container liner named Hanjin declared bankruptcy, and that year the shipping industry faced a loss of about 10 billion US Dollars.
A few weeks back, while glancing at the business section of my local newspaper, a news clip stated that the container shipping industry contributed to a whopping 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emission annually.
So what's the container shipping industry, how does it function, what are its problems faced and the current scenario the industry?
About Container Shipping Industry-
The transporting of various products around the world was frequently required with the increase in trade and business connections across the world. The process of loading cargo onto ships from trucks, then unloading them when the destination was reached, reloading them onto trucks and getting them delivered was a lengthy, tedious and an extremely slow process.
The idea of containerization dates back to the early 19th century but the system was not prevalent until the end of World War II when there was financial instability, less storage spaces in warehouses and increased need of transporting a lot of goods around the globe. Containerization saved time, space and also reduced misplacement and theft of goods during the journey. There was less requirement of manpower hence financial burden was reduced. The faster process enabled more transactions to take place in a short period of time giving an economic boost to trade and commerce. With the success in the standardization of shipments via containerization, this became a popular and major system for transportation of goods.
Even though I, and the rest of the world give credits to Malcolm Maclean for such an excellent idea, it remained in the preliminary stages, as time progressed, since it was seen that the container shipping industry did not evolve with time. Thus, the difference in time zones took a toll on the industry.
Problems Faced-
Despite being one of the largest industries that was hugely responsible for the economy of the country, despite being the major shareholder of the shipping industry, significant losses were faced by containerization due to various problems.
The earlier boost in the container shipping resulted in building and use of numerous shipments that remained unlisted and hence now unused and unfunded in different locations across the globe. Lack of a proper list of containers resulted in overpopulation of ships that were nonfunctional and adding to nothing towards the industry. The mismanagement between the size of ships and ports also comprised a major problem as ports struggled to keep up with the increasing size of container ships which were necessary to fuel the economy.
Another interesting trend I saw, was the of forming alliances that began after the Hanjin incident to avoid such bankruptcy which lead to monopolies and an increasingly centralized platform that removed smaller industries out of the competition.
Such grave issues needed to be addressed immediately.
The solution comes in form of blockshipping.
About Blockshipping-
Blockshipping has a Global Shared Container Platform (GSCP) that provided the much needed registry of ships along with providing their real time locations across the world. Powered by blockchain, the trusted public ledger, the system automatically becomes safe, secure and free from errors and extremely transparent. It also aims to handle transaction fees with the help of smart contracts so as to ensure fast and efficient service with easy transaction history details to promote mistake free results.
Another huge benefit I think Blockshipping provides, is the claim of reducing carbon dioxide emission of the containers to a significant amount due to proper management of containers and ensuring that no empty container is unnecessarily repositioned. Blockshipping uses two types of tokens for transactions, an internal token for local transactions and the external tokens is a form of the reward system for token holders.
Conclusion-
Blockshipping is set forth to change the model of container shipping industry in a way to maximize profits and minimize environmental pollution. With a skilled team of 75 years of experience in this industry, I believe they form a fail proof strategy to save an integral industry of the world.
Website - https://www.blockshipping.io/
Whitepaper - https://www.blockshipping.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Blockshipping_GSCP_ICO_White_Paper_public.pdf
ANN - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3502572.0
Telegram - https://t.me/blockshipping/
Published by - icomantra
Profile - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2152283