The Freight Buyers' Club

The Freight Buyers’ Club podcast is a new home for anyone with a professional interest in international trade, container shipping, procurement, logistics and air cargo. Each episode your host, award-winning journalist Mike King, will be speaking to leading decision-makers, analysts, journalists, operators and shippers to get their take on current freight and logistics markets and the challenges and opportunities ahead. You can subscribe to receive each episode direct to your inbox at: thefreightbuyersclub.com

The Freight Buyers' Club is a news podcast hosted by Mike King, with 159 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Mike King hosts The Freight Buyers' Club, a news show with 159 episodes published.

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  The Freight Buyers' Club

  Can Dubai's Ports Ever Recover From the Hormuz Crisis?

  Sep 29, 20269 min

  an Dubai's ports ever recover from the Hormuz closure? Mike King and Drewry port specialist Eleanor Hadland analyse the region's shifting maritime landscape. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced a rethink of logistics across the Middle East. With global trade routes under constant pressure, this episode examines how Middle Eastern logistics are adapting to new geopolitical realities. Eleanor Hadland joins the show to break down the massive capital expenditure currently flooding into the region, including the new 434 million dollar terminal in Jeddah and the wider scramble for infrastructure investment. Beyond the Gulf, we look at the feasibility of alternative overland routes and the long-term outlook for Dubai's port sector. If you are tracking the future of global supply chain capacity and regional port investment, this analysis provides the expert perspective you need on where the money is going and why. This is a clip from the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club. Check us out on YouTube and all podcast platforms. Thanks to Dimerco Express Group (https://dimerco.com/) for sponsoring the show. Can Dubai's ports ever recover from the Hormuz closure? Mike King and port specialist Eleanor Hadland analyse the region's shifting maritime landscape. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced a rethink of logistics across the Middle East. With global trade routes under constant pressure, this episode examines how Middle Eastern logistics are adapting to new geopolitical realities. Eleanor Hadland joins the show to break down the massive capital expenditure currently flooding into the region, including the new 434 million dollar terminal in Jeddah and the wider scramble for infrastructure investment. Beyond the Gulf, we look at the feasibility of alternative overland routes and the long-term outlook for Dubai's port sector. If you are tracking the future of global supply chain capacity and regional port investment, this analysis provides the expert perspective you need on where the money is going and why. This is a clip from the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club. Check us out on YouTube and all podcast platforms. Thanks to Dimerco Express Group (https://dimerco.com/) for sponsoring the show. #StraitOfHormuz #PortInvestment #ContainerShipping #SupplyChain #FreightBuyersClub

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  The Freight Buyers' Club

  The Professor Exposing What AI Vendors Won't Tell You

  Sep 20, 202614 min

  Nada Sanders, Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University and author of The Human/Machine, has spent decades studying how businesses forecast risk, and years serving as an expert witness in cases involving AI vendors. In this clip she explains what that experience has taught her, and it isn't flattering to the industry. Her clearest warning is about hidden costs. She says she can "almost guarantee" that any company buying an AI package will hit costs it didn't see coming, sometimes for things as basic as querying the algorithm a different way. Before that, she lays out concrete practices for moving from reacting to risk to actually anticipating it. That means looking past transactional data like past orders and shipments, which only tell you what already happened, and tracking external signals instead, supplier behaviour, port congestion, weather, geopolitical events. It means building a handful of plausible future scenarios rather than betting on one forecast. And it means predefining trigger points in advance, so that when lead times jump or a supplier's reliability drops past a set threshold, the response is automatic rather than argued over after the fact. She also walks through what her book's central argument, that this was never a contest between humans and machines, looks like in practice. At Unilever, AI handles high volume, early stage hiring screens while humans keep the final call. At Maersk and Amazon, AI tracks far more shipments, demand shifts and supplier issues than any person could process, flags anomalies and possible bottlenecks, then hands the decision, reroute or don't, to the human who understands the customer relationship. The harder question, she says, is what changes with agentic AI, where the system doesn't just recommend, it acts. That means deciding in advance where humans still need to check in, what level of uncertainty is acceptable before escalating to a person, and just as importantly, when the AI should stop acting altogether. Watch the full episode of The Freight Buyers' Club for more from Nada Sanders, alongside Andre Simha (former digital transformation chief at MSC) and Pawan Joshi (Chief Strategy Officer, e2open), on forecasting, resilience and the future of human and AI collaboration in supply chains.

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  The Freight Buyers' Club

  Container Shipping's Real Problem Is Trust - Andre Simha (ex-MSC)

  Sep 19, 20269 min

  In this clip from The Freight Buyers' Club, Andre Simha, who chaired the Digital Container Shipping Association for seven years, explains why container shipping's real problem isn't technology. It's trust. Andre explains that getting fiercely competitive shipping lines to agree on basic data standards was hard, but achievable. Getting the industry to actually adopt those standards afterward has been much harder. He calls it a vicious circle. Everyone wants visibility, but sharing information means trusting other companies with it. He also compares today's AI evangelists to the blockchain evangelists who pitched him the same ideas a decade ago, in some cases the same people. His test for any new technology is simple. Does it remove a real, specific manual task. If not, he's not interested. Andre closes with the electronic bill of lading as proof of the problem. Years after the pandemic pushed hard for it, adoption still sits at only 10 to 20 percent. Andre Simha spent nearly 39 years at MSC, the world's largest container shipping line, the last five and a half as its digital transformation chief, before stepping down this spring. #ContainerShipping #ShippingIndustry #Logistics

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  The Freight Buyers' Club

  Air Cargo Unpacked: Liege E-commerce Forum Takeaways, Miami Disaster, Freighter Orders, Oman Air's Mike Duggan

  Sep 15, 202641 min

  Reporting live from the EU Cross-Border E-commerce Forum in Liège this month, Mike King and Neel Jones Shah break down why EU e-commerce demand has stalled following new de minimis rules, drawing on conversations with regulators and industry figures at the forum, plus fresh data from Rotate. They also cover a new US Customs and Border Protection disclosure proposal and a companion trade crimes bill working through Congress, a fresh wave of freighter orders from Ethiopian Airlines, Afcom and MSC Air Cargo, and the runway accident involving an Amazon Prime Air flight at Miami International. Neil Wilson of TAC Index, calculating agent for the Baltic Air Freight Indices, joins with his monthly rates analysis and peak season outlook. In the second half, Mike Duggan, Head of Cargo at Oman Air, joins to talk through rebuilding Oman Air's cargo business after a turbulent year in the Gulf, Muscat's rise as a logistics hub, and his read on where the market goes next. Comes packed with new graphics, maps and animations to help make sense of it all. #SupplyChain #Logistics #AirCargo #AirFreight #OmanAir

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  The Freight Buyers' Club

  Agentic AI and Supply Chain Resilience, with e2open's Pawan Joshi, Northeastern's Nada Sanders and Andre Simha (ex-MSC)

  Sep 9, 20261h 19m

  Disruption is now the baseline for global trade, not the exception. This episode looks at what real resilience takes on the ground, how technology fits in as decision infrastructure, and covers agentic AI, including who's accountable when it gets the call wrong. Mike King speaks with three guests who bring experience and insight from different perspectives across the industry. Guests Pawan Joshi is Chief Strategy Officer at e2open, which became part of the $2 billion WiseTech Global group last year, after more than two decades building the company's supply chain platform. Nada Sanders is Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business, ranked among the top 2% of scientists worldwide by Stanford, and author of The Humachine. Andre Simha spent nearly 39 years at MSC, the world's largest shipping line, the last five and a half as its digital transformation chief, and chaired the Digital Container Shipping Association for seven years. 0:00 Why Disruption Is Now the Baseline for Trade 2:02 Meet the Panel 4:35 Firefighting vs Preventing Supply Chain Risk 7:05 Planning for a Range of Futures, Not One Plan 9:20 Inside the Ocean Shipping Index 11:15 The COVID Lead Time Failure 14:05 Supply Chain Visibility vs Early Warning 17:00 Three Practices for Earlier Risk Detection 19:05 The Human Machine and the Unilever Example 23:30 AI Vendor Promises and Where the Human Role Shifts 28:35 Supply Chains Built for a 50 to 70 Year Old World 32:10 The Cold Chain Example and Closing the Loop 36:50 Why e2open and CargoWise Came Together 44:30 Trust, Not Standards, Is the Real Barrier 47:10 Digital Supply Chain Standards and the Adoption Problem 52:00 Agentic AI vs the Blockchain Evangelists 56:00 Agentic AI and the Football Match Maturity Question 62:00 Who's Accountable When Agentic AI Gets It Wrong 69:00 What's Not Being Taken Seriously 73:10 Closing Predictions, Reasons for Optimism #SupplyChain #Resilience #Logistics #GlobalTrade #Disruption #SupplyChainManagement #DigitalTransformation #FreightBuyersClub #AgenticAI #ArtificialIntelligence #ContainerShipping

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