Hello and good morning. Thank you all for joining us today. We're starting to see the attendee numbers climb as everyone's jumping on today's webinar. Again, you are joining Expeditors Americas Ocean Market Update webinar, and we appreciate you joining. My name is Samantha Hurst, and I'm one of our managers for marketing and bids for the Americas. And I will be supporting today in the background. So if you have any technical issues or questions, we will absolutely be able to support that. So we'll go over a couple of housekeeping items and then introduce our speakers before we get started. So for many of you who have joined our webinars in the past, especially these Ocean webinars, you probably know how this runs. But for anyone who does not, we just want to let you know that it is typically about 45 minutes of content.
And then at the end, we'll go over a question and answer session. If you do have questions, you're welcome to drop those throughout the webinar. We will address as many of them as we can, either directly, or we will save them for the end for that Q&A session. But please do put them into the Q&A box specifically, and that will help us keep track of those. One of the main questions we will always get and are happy to answer is, "How do I receive the slides?" So for this webinar, as all of them, you do get a short survey that we ask that you fill out. And typically, that will be emailed to you within about an hour to two hours after this event wraps up today.
When you complete that survey, and it will only take you just a minute or two, it's very short, it will send you to a landing page where you can actually download the slides of the presentation today. Now, if you want to know how you get additional information about future webinars, and we do have quite a slew of them planned for 2025, you can scan this QR code here, and it will take you to a subscription page where you can get set up to get webinar invites as well as local and global market updates, so I will introduce our speakers briefly and turn it over so we can get to the content. We have with us today Scott Kelly. He is our Vice President of Ocean Services for the Americas, and Mike Barba. He's our Director of Ocean Business Development for the Americas.
And then also helping in the background is Wayne Ingram. He's one of our trade managers, trade lane managers for our Ocean Team for the Americas. So gentlemen, thank you all for joining us today. Customers, thank you all for joining. I'm going to turn it over to Mike to get us started with the content.
Thank you, Samantha, and thank you, everyone, for joining. We really appreciate it. It looks like we have a big crowd this morning, and it's always exciting to be able to show you and share some information with you about the ocean market. I'm the Director of Ocean Business Development for the Americas. I sit in our corporate headquarters in Seattle. I'll let Scott and Wayne introduce themselves. My background prior to Expeditors, I've been here now 20 years, was actually on the liner side. So I have experience on both, as does Mr. Kelly. So I'll turn it over to Scott and Wayne to introduce themselves, and then we'll get going.
Okay. Thanks for joining us. My name is Scott Kelly. I'm Vice President of Ocean Services for the Americas. I've been in the business for 35 years, and I've been with Expeditors for 27 years, and like Mike started out, my first part of my career on the carrier side, so that experience has kind of helped us along as we went. So thanks for joining us.
Thank you, guys. Good morning, everyone. So Wayne Ingram, Trade and Business Development Manager for the Americas, currently domiciled in our Houston office. I've been with Expeditors for 17 years. So thank you, guys, for joining.
Okay. Thanks, guys. Just a quick, let me make sure we get my mouse back to where it belongs. This is our disclaimer, and we have to show this in anything we present to the general public. And it's a very vanilla disclaimer. But what we're going to share with you, this sharing any proprietary information with you, Expeditors' proprietary information, we're sharing information that's domiciled in the public domain. We sift through that. We draw some conclusions. We want to share that with you. We hope you draw the same conclusions from it. Certainly, if you have questions as we go along, as Samantha said, please put it in the Q&A box, and we'll do our best to answer the questions before the end of the webinar. But if we don't get to them, we will answer your question. We'll answer it via email.
We have your email address on the login. So don't be afraid. If we don't get to it during this time period, we will get to it. We will not ignore it. We will answer the question to the best of our ability. So what we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk about market levers. When we talk about the ocean market, we talk about what drives behavior, what drives carriers' behavior, what drives capacity, demand. These levers drive behavior in the marketplace. And they're very simple. It's capacity, which is basically supply, demand, which is the amount of throughput. Okay? So you have supply and demand. You have operating expense. So how costly is it to move this cargo through the pipeline, depending upon where it's coming from and where it's going to? That drives the fourth lever, which is financial performance.
Carriers behave dramatically differently when they're making money versus when they're losing money. Okay? And we'll show you a little bit in the presentation here some of the things that are happening on the financial side for the carriers. They're making a lot of money right now. The biggest lever, the one that's had the most impact in the last probably two or three years, is outside factors. And that has not only to do with labor disruptions and geopolitical unrest, but as well, market growth, demand growth, lots of changes from a political perspective and political parties around the globe, not just here in the United States and in the Americas. And so we'll spend a little bit of time on each of these levers and try to help you understand what's going on in the lever.
As an example, I'll just quickly just take capacity, and we'll show you a little bit, a lot more about this, a lot more detail about this. But capacity right now in 2025 is projected to be around 6% growth over 2024. So those are the type of things we're going to show you. And hopefully, again, we're going to ask you, or we're hoping that you draw the same conclusions we do. Ultimately, okay, it still all does go back to supply and demand. Okay? When there is a high demand and low amount of supply or capacity, there becomes a capacity shortage, rates go up. And on the reverse side, when there's a tremendous amount of capacity out in the marketplace, okay, and not enough demand to keep pace with that capacity, the rates go down. Very simple.
You would think, okay, based on some of the data that we're going to share with you this morning, you would think, "Well, Mike, there's a lot of capacity. There's 3 million positions that came into the marketplace." And that's where the outside factors come in. That's where all this dilemma begins to position itself from the Suez Canal situation, the Red Sea. We had a Panama Canal situation. So there's lots of things that impact this supply and demand cycle, and we'll do our best to take you through those. Ultimately, if you put them together, and this fundamentally becomes one of the issues with the ocean market, and this goes back, we measure it back. This is from Alphaliner, a subscription-based service that we pay for. And it's basically showing you annual capacity growth compared to annual demand or throughput growth. And this is global.
But look at the roller coaster we've been on since 2014. It never comes in balance. And so that's why we have this disruptive market, why we have this market that constantly is just up and down. It's like Scott has a boat. It's like being on a boat, okay? And you're in some rough waters. And we've been in rough waters for a long time. So projected in 2025, again, out of balance, 6% growth on the capacity side. So there were 3 million positions that came in the marketplace, all right? If you look at the order book, there's 8.2 million TEUs that are on the order book right now. In January through November, okay, 433 vessels were delivered globally on the capacity side. So almost 3 million positions, 3 million TEUs. Roughly, the global fleet's about 27 million TEUs.
It's robust growth year- over- year of about 10%. Projected deliveries, okay, in 2025. And again, these are deliveries that are on the order books. These are ships that are currently either in shipyards being built or on the order books to be delivered in 2025. Another 2 million TEUs coming into the marketplace on the capacity side. So of course, the question you lead into the question, "Well, what's going to happen with all this? Is it all just going to come in the marketplace?" And right now, deletions, which is scraps, okay, is not heavy. If you look at the deletions and you look at just, well, hold on one second. Let me see if I can. In November, okay, the deletions, okay, compared to the deliveries was less than 1%. Very small. So they're not scrapping vessels.
Capacity is being brought into the marketplace, but it's not being scrapped. It's not going back out on the bottom side. And you'd say, "Okay, well, where's all this excess capacity? It must be laying around. It must be putting a lot of downward pressure on the rates." It's not. Because from an idle perspective, okay, less than 1% of the fleet. So 0.6% of the fleet. There's only 58 vessels that are currently in the global fleet, based on the data we get from Alphaliner, that are idle. 1.9%, so about 600,000 TEUs, about 135 vessels, are in what they call in yard. So they're shipyards. They're for routine maintenance. There's emergency repairs. There's retrofitting. There's conversions. But it excludes new buildings. This is not, again, new builds that are in shipyards being built to come out. This is idle.
It's, as you can tell, only 2.5% of the total fleet. So if you take that 30 million TEUs, only 190 ships, only let's round it up to 800,000. Only 800,000 TEUs are idle. So capacity is being utilized. And it's going to drive what you'll see later here as we get further into the presentation. It's what's driving a lot of the financial positioning and some of the other levers. I'm going to turn it to Scott, and he's going to just take you through the second lever, which is demand.
Okay. Thanks, Mike. So we're going to talk about demand for the next couple of slides. Things are positive around the world. Remember, this is a global perspective, not just the Americas perspective. But if you look at the globe, growth this year was fairly; it wasn't robust, but it was good. I mean, anywhere from 1.9%-5% growth, depending on the month. Overall, it's about 3%. Not great, but still positive growth. Mike, will you go to the next slide? And then when we look at it a little bit further, we look at the verticals. So we're looking at raw materials, consumer goods, machineries, chemicals, automotive. The one thing we want you to take from this slide is look at the bottom line on each one of these, year-to-date, January through October. Positive, positive, positive.
All of the verticals around the world, these verticals where we measure and monitor what's going on with fashion, temperature control, that sort of thing, all positive. And not small numbers. Like raw materials is 7%. Temperature control is up 4%. Tech is up 3%. Automotive is up 4%. So these are big moving commodities in the world. And again, automotive, consumer goods, fashion, tech, all are very large commodities, very large verticals in the various trades, east, west, north, south. Okay? So positive news everywhere on that year-to-date. So it's been a good year in terms of the balance of the types of commodities that are shipping. And then we take a look at the market trends for each major geography in the world, import and export. And it's interesting that, again, positive everywhere. The only negative is U.S. exports. And that's off 7%.
So U.S. exports are negative, but just about every other trade lane in the world has positive, reflects positive growth. Okay? Next, Mike. And again, kind of refined one more way to take a look at not only the geographies, but take a look at the trade lanes in those geographies. If you look and you see here on the right-hand side year-to-date, mostly positive, only a few negative areas. Africa to North America is off. That's a tiny trade lane. If you look at, again, North America to Africa, that's off. Everything else is. Europe to Asia is flat, - 0.6%. That's a big trade lane. But that's the only big trade lane that's really negative. So good news everywhere here for our business.
I think, Scott, to your point, right? You look at some of these, and I apologize. What you're looking at is data we got from Accenture, okay, which is another subscription-based service that we pay for. This is January through October. That's the most recent set of data that we have. So it's not full year. But as Scott said, I mean, look at Asia is one of the critical ones you really want to look at in Europe. And you look at year-to-date numbers from Asia, okay, to every region, okay, and there's nothing less than 7%. There's demand, and it supports from a capacity perspective where the capacity is being deployed. The carriers are deploying that capacity. So again, it's interesting to watch on the demand side because I think we have some generalizations sometimes. I hear a lot in my travels.
Scott hears the same thing, and Wayne hears the same thing. It's like, "Well, demand is awful." It's like, "No, it's not awful. It's not robust. Okay? It's not going through the ceiling, but it's not bad." The issue is capacity is so high, but again, from an outside factor perspective, because of these outside factors, that final lever, particularly the Suez Canal situation, that capacity is being utilized. So we took you through the first two levers. We took you through supply. We took you through demand. Okay? Operating expense. The largest operating expense, okay, and we'll cover that next. If you look from a rate index perspective, and why do we look at rate indexes? Indices, I'm sorry. Rate indices is because they show trends. I caution anyone that asks me a question about this, and we get this a lot.
It's like, "Well, is that the rate? So is the North Asia to Europe rate $4,000?" No, this is an index rate. Okay? It's not necessarily the rate that moves the freight. The key to looking at an index is look at the trending. Okay? And so if you look at the trending in all the major trades in Asia to U.S., Asia to Europe, and Europe to U.S., those are the three, what we call the head haul trade lanes. They typically drive behavior. They'll give you indicators as to what's going to happen in the rest of global markets. Look at Asia to the U.S. The rate, okay, index was very high, okay, in July of 2024, okay, right up until end of September 2024, and why was that?
A lot of pre-pulling of cargo because of fear of a labor disruption, okay, as well as the typical Chinese holidays that happened in October. So again, look at the trending. But look where the trending is going now, okay, as we get pretty close to Q1. I think these slides are as of the end of December. The rate trending is going up. Asia-Europe, the rate trending has slowly since about October, up. Okay? Europe to U.S. East Coast, okay, very stable. Okay? So the rate trending, the index says that rates, okay, from an operating expense perspective, are not crashing. The one thing we look at from an operating expense perspective, and we watch this really closely because fuel is the largest operating expense of every carrier. And again, we don't own the asset, so we've poked around this a lot trying to understand it.
We suspect that 60% of the carrier's operating expense is fuel. And you can tell, and we only took a 14-point global average of VLSFO, which is very low sulfur fuel oil. From a bunker perspective, you have the old bunker fuel, which is really dirty. You have the VLSFO, and then you have even a higher version of VLSFO. It's very. I think what's the one above VLSFO, Scott? I don't remember off the top of my head, but it's a higher-priced version of fuel, cleaner fuel. Most carriers burn this VLSFO. And if you look at from Ship & Bunker, again, we went to an outside source to verify our data. The fuel cost right now, it's not accelerating. It got a little soft probably towards the beginning of December, and it's still pretty soft.
Anytime it's below $600 a ton, okay, we don't necessarily look at that from an operating cost perspective and begin to kind of send the flares up saying, "Hey, this is a red flag. We ought to really keep an eye on this." Now, that could change as we get a little bit further here into 2025, and that has a lot to do particularly with the EU and the ETS, and so that fuel surcharge because the European Union will begin to collect, okay, that fee in August of this year. I suspect that that will be an operating cost that will probably go up for any vessels into or out of the European Union. So what does it do? What is, as the supply and demand, okay, as the two levers, for lack of a better description, kind of balance, right?
There's no downward pressure on the rate side. The operating costs are somewhat in check. What happens to the third? What happens to the fourth lever? What happens to the financial performance? You can see what happens. So in 2023, as the market got soft and as there was a tremendous amount. Now, remember, 2023 is pre-Suez Canal, pre-Red Sea situation. Tremendous amount of capacity, soft demand. What happened? The carrier's profitability began to slide from highs in 2021 and 2022. Okay? And we know what that. I mean, you're coming out of the pandemic, right? 2023, they slid below the line for the first time, okay, in probably three and a half, almost four years. Okay? They slid below the line. Didn't take them long to get back above the line. And that was a lot of it was assisted with artificial constriction of capacity, some voided sailings.
Scott will take you through some of the impact that's happening on this. Right now, you can tell in 2024, the third quarter results, 38.4%, okay, average core EBITDA margin. They're making a lot of money, and they're going to behave very differently as they continue. We think they're going to continue to make money. Scott, I'm going to turn it back to Scott because there's consequences, okay? Yeah. With them trying to make money with their operating costs, okay, labor, and all these disruptions, right? There's consequences to how they move this capacity around.
Okay. So I'll take it. So I think everybody on this call who's moving freight understands that schedule reliability has been bad. Combination of carriers. And it is bad because of outside factors, as Mike mentioned, particularly the Suez Canal in the past. When we look at measurements over the years, the Panama Canal had its challenges. That's better. But the Suez Canal has really challenged the carriers to reschedule or change their schedules or what they had for proformas completely changed. Great example of that is a new alliance between Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd. They needed 300 ships to deploy that new alliance. We're going to talk about that later. With the Suez situation, they need 340 ships to run that operation. So that's 40 ships. That's a significant portion of their inventory. So what we're seeing is continued schedule volatility.
I think we believe through the end of second quarter, we're going to probably see things like they are today. However, the Maersk, the Gemini alliance is really focused on a hub-and-spoke operation. And I think they will bring the overall number up if they do what they think they're going to do. But we see volatility for the next two quarters in the schedule reliability. And we're acting to deal with that. But we don't think it's going to get any better for at least two more quarters. So as you can see, by trade lane, the big east-west trades are the ones most impacted. And they're not good. Okay. Mike, I think you can take this one.
Yeah. No, actually, I think this one is yours.
Okay.
It's going to be fun because we've taken you kind of through all these levers, right? We've taken you through now supply or capacity. We've taken you through demand. We've taken you through operating expense, right? And we're going to cover another big operating expense that's coming here, right, which is labor. We've taken you through the financial positioning. We're now at outside factors. And these outside factors, these disruptors, all right, they will continue through 2025 and beyond. Supply and demand imbalance. Natural disasters. We don't talk about that a lot, but that's a critical part of what happens on the ocean side from a liner perspective. We can't avoid those. There's no, if you can control the weather, call me and let me know, and we could probably make a lot of money. There are geopolitical concerns, as Scott said, I mean, and they continue to be that.
Lots of elections globally happen. We know here in the United States, we're in for a change of administration, and that will present probably some interesting dynamics. I'm trying to choose my words very carefully here and as Scott said, carrier alliance changes but labor, which was on everybody's mind, so Scott, I'll turn it over to you because this is actually good news.
Okay. So yeah. So I don't know if everybody knows this, but last night, the Longshoremen and the USMX, which is management, came to an agreement. The good news is we have averted a strike or a lockout. There will be no work disruption on January 15th. Carriers will go back to normal operations. I think you'll see the next couple of days because they were actually not taking bookings. They were not taking reefer bookings. They were not taking intermodal bookings and that sort of thing. They'll go back to normal. And I think that will happen in the next day or so. What happens next? The next thing that happens is they take this deal and they go back to the locals and the rank and file of the ILA, and they vote to ratify it or not.
And so the terms of the deal have not become public, but they will over time. The good news is we have a deal. Okay? Mike.
Yeah. Carrier alliance changes. And I think, Scott, you're going to take this lever because we think these two levers, up until last night, these were the two biggest disruptor levers that we saw on the horizon. Thank goodness lever number five or door number five has, at least in the short term, been somewhat abated. We've avoided it. But we still have a very interesting disruptor in the marketplace, and that's these carrier alliance changes. So Scott, I'll hand it to you.
Yeah. So a minute ago, I was talking about schedule integrity and schedule reliability and it being off and being at roughly 50%, and the reason we don't think it's going to get better is this slide right here. There's a change in vessel slot sharing agreements. The carriers, multiple carriers on one ship, are shifting, and the big one that is, if you will, ground-moving is the Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd alliance called Gemini, and the new Gemini alliance, it's a huge alliance. Two of the biggest European carriers aligned. They think they're very focused on operations and operational excellence and actually schedule integrity, so we think their new services will have better schedules in terms of integrity. But we'll see because they're actually also changing to a hub-and-spoke program and deployment, which we've never seen in our business yet, so big risk there, but we'll see how it goes.
And also the withdrawal of Maersk from the change of pulling Maersk out of the MSC alliance and pulling Hapag-Lloyd out of the alliance, which was the alliance with ONE and Yang Ming. And so that shift is, again, ships are going to the new rotations. They are changing over to the new operation. They are even changing terminals and port operations. So we think that will cause some schedule reliability and disruption in the next two quarters. For us, and just kind of laying some of our strategy, we want to be balanced among those four major alliances. And we want access to carriers on those alliances that fit our customer requirements by deployment and by allocation.
So we'll make sure that we have access to all four of these major alliances so we have the ability to shift and change as things get better and/or schedules are changing and we find better schedules for our customers. Okay. Thanks, Mike.
Hey, and then.
Hey, Mike. We have a couple of questions in the Q&A here. So Alejandra wanted to know what they think about their vendors because of the schedule reliability, that they should move forward with asking them to book further in advance with their vendors and things like that as well.
Alejandra, I would say if you can do that, if you can move further to the left, okay, to build a little bit of a fluff into the transit time or build some leeway in there, okay, in order that in anticipation that the schedule reliability, as Scott said, is not going to get better in the short term. In fact, we're really watching this very closely now because this new alliance, this Hapag and Maersk alliance, which officially starts February 1, Scott, I think it's February 1.
Yeah. February 1 is New Year.
That whole shifting of vessels, of strings, of a hub-and-spoke operation, that's going to cause impact from a reliability perspective. So to answer your question directly, yes. If you can move it left, if you can build some buffer, okay, into your supply chain, our recommendation would be yes to do that.
And I caution you, if you move left, your accuracy is more difficult to make. It's difficult to predict that your shipment will be ready when you say it's going to be ready. Integrity on that side. And booking fall down. If you have a tradition of dropping off on your bookings, even though you went instead of two weeks, you went three weeks, but then your drop-off is 30%. The carriers know this, and they'll account for it. So you can actually do yourself damage going too far to the left if you're not accurate. You need to be accurate.
There's some interesting questions in the chat box. I think we'll get to those. Just give us a moment because we're just about through here. I would be remiss if I didn't. Scott hit a little bit on it already, and I'll hit on it one more time. What's our value proposition to you as the customer? What do we bring to the table that we feel entices you or says to you, "Yeah, I want to do business with Expeditors"? We hope Scott hit it before, and we'll reinforce it again. Our wide carrier footprint, especially with all the disruptions that we think is on the horizon, is absolutely critical, okay, to successfully managing your supply chain.
Value-added services, okay, I think many of you know our organization well enough to know we have a wide scope of services from air freight to distribution to domestic trucking, cross-dock, customs brokerage, you name it, okay, we have it. We are very flexible when it comes, especially because of that wide carrier footprint. We pride ourselves on the fact that we do have local support. We have boots on the ground in almost every global marketplace. Okay? We do not have a network of agents. Okay? We have our own offices and local support in the local markets. We're a publicly traded company. We're very financially stable. We are extremely conservative. I think you probably can see that based on the way we're dressed and the way we present ourselves, and we pride ourselves on that. We are very risk-averse. Okay?
We do not want to take a risk with your supply chain, so we will be conservative at times, but we will be for sure compliant, and so with that, and before I get to the last slide, I'm going to try to take a look in the Q&A box just to see if there's anything in there. There's a good question, and I'm going to answer it live on the news that COSCO has been designated as a Chinese military company by the U.S. government. So Scott, do you want to take that?
Yeah. There's CFRs and rules on this. So far, we'll actually send you out some information on this. But what we understand from this is that they are considered an extension of the Chinese military. However, the rule doesn't really have any restrictions on who can use them. If our customers are doing business with the government or the military, they generally flag what they call U.S. Flag Impelled. It has to move on an American ship anyway. And it wouldn't move on a Chinese carrier. Commercially, there's no restriction to this ruling at the moment. There may be in the future, but for today, there is no restriction relative to the commercial use of COSCO. So we'll see what happens, what evolves with this, what the strategy is here. But there's no change.
I know there were a couple of questions in the chat box about the wildfires in Los Angeles and will that cause disruption on the West Coast. Hard to say at the moment. They are not. Okay? But depending on how bad they become, it could potentially have some impact. At the moment, though, it is not causing any disruption in the PSW ports. There was a question in the box, and I'm going to try to answer it, okay, about possible tariffs globally. And to answer it, we don't know yet. Okay? There's a lot of beating of the drums with the new administration as to what potentially could happen. But no, at the moment, there is not any indication yet as to exactly what will happen. We certainly will keep an eye on it. I will try to answer another question live here about the contract rates.
Will they be at pre-COVID level or still higher than that? I would be remiss to tell you we don't want to predict the future. Based on historical trends, I don't think that they'll be back down as low as they were pre-COVID, but I don't think they'll be as high as they were during the height of COVID. But a lot of that is going to depend on what happens here. Scott hit on it before. You have a situation with the alliances shifting with a new alliance being formed. MSC is out on their own. It's hard to predict what will happen. And you still have the major disruptor, which is the Red Sea situation that is continuing to soak up capacity. There is very little excess capacity in the marketplace. And so that in and of itself, keeps upward pressure on rates.
If I could jump in on that without giving guidance on where rates will be because we don't know, but I will say this, or we will say this. In 2014 versus today, 10 years ago, there were 16 carriers that controlled 80% of the world's capacity. Today, there's about 7. Okay, so the number of carriers, the people that own the steel, there's fewer of them, so they get the better horizontal perspective of what is going on with the major markets, and they're shifting their ships, and they're moving them much more rapidly to the markets that are hot versus the markets that are weak, then when the market is weak, it changes the dynamics, and so that's why we're seeing so much volatility and schedule integrity again, getting back to the schedule integrity, because the carriers react very quickly, and we will continue to see that.
So if the rates do get to levels that are unprofitable, the carriers will react very quickly. And so either the rate will go up or the services will drop off.
The capacity will get sidelined. And I think if you remember our slide on the financials of the carriers, you saw what happened as they slid the minute they slid below the line in 2023. What did they do? They absolutely began to shift capacity. They began to sideline capacity. They slowed down ships. And just through, and I don't want to make this sound the wrong way, but just through the fact that the Suez Canal, the Red Sea situation happened, they avoided, okay, staying below the line. It was less than a quarter, and they were back up high profitability because of upward pressure on the rates because there was no excess capacity. I'll try to answer one more question.
There's a question in the box about any way to know in advance or take action for in-transit shipments changing vessels or being left at transit ports for an extended period of time. That's part of what we do if you utilize our services is we track and trace cargo from the day we confirm it onboard through the gate of port of exit, okay, all the way through to port of arrival. So yes, you would know if it didn't make a feeder vessel, would you know in advance? That's harder to predict because a lot of the missed vessels happen at the very last moment. You'll have a vessel that'll go into a transship port as an example. It'll come out of, let's just use an example, it may come out of Southeast Asia somewhere and transship over Singapore. It gets into the port in Singapore.
It has about a 48-hour window to get a feeder vessel, and if that feeder vessel is late or conversely, if the mother vessel can't hold to wait for it, you're going to miss. That's very hard to predict. There's a great question in the box. What's the perspective on the possibility of shipments moving through the Red Sea sometime this year? I wish we knew. We don't know, and anyone that tells you differently. Okay, I think they're just guessing, but right now, based on what we're being told by our carrier, our vendors, our suppliers, okay, that Red Sea situation is not going to abate itself in the short term. I know there's a couple of questions in the box, and we'll get to those.
We'll send you an answer and get you with some local support to try to see if we can't begin to do business. I think that's great. There is a good question in there, and I'll read the question. I don't necessarily know the answer. The question was, how do new alternative fuels compare to very low sulfur fuel oil in terms of cost and availability? Josh, I don't know. And I think there's a lot of question marks on methane, and there's a lot of question marks on LNG. And I don't think they're answered yet. So just a little bit more advertising for you because I think Samantha hit on this in the beginning. Lots of stuff out there for upcoming events. I hope that you would take the opportunity to participate in those.
Absolutely, Mike. Thank you so much for pointing out that. So these QR codes here, you all can scan. And these are just a few samplings of what we have coming up the rest of the month of January and into February. There is a possibility I know we had several questions related to tariffs and those impacts on the market. There's a good chance we will be having another customs market update webinar, potentially even this month as we learn more towards the end of the month. So keep your eyes open for that. That's not listed here yet as it's not official, but we are working on the potential of that. And then also, we've had a lot of requests for additional kind of more of an in-depth anti-dumping course and countervailing duties. So you see that one there in the middle.
That will go a little more in-depth if you have been looking for something beyond the basics on that one. But some great events coming up. Also, as we mentioned earlier, you can subscribe to get all of these invites to your email box so you don't miss another one. All right. I think that brings us to the end of the questions, I believe, unless Scott or Mike, you guys see anything else that you wanted to address or last comments?
A couple of questions in there that we'll type responses to. But anything that's in the box that we didn't get to, we'll certainly make sure that we get an answer to you on that. And there were several inquiries in the Q&A box about getting in touch, a local perspective, and beginning to do business, which is great. That was the objective of the webinar. So success. Thank you very much. We will get our local personnel in touch with you for sure. And again, I can't thank everybody enough. I mean, to have close to 800 people on a call is just fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time and listening to our drivel here, for lack of a better description. I know I can get a little chatty at times, but I hope we got our points across, and I hope you enjoyed the webinar.
If I can just take note, thank you very much for your business. We appreciate it. We'll take care of it. We appreciate your trust.
Absolutely, so one last final word there again. If you want the slides, please do look for the survey that we will be sending you via email here in the next hour or so, and we're even giving you guys almost 15 minutes back of your day, so I'm sure there's some on the East Coast who may be wanting to grab lunch. You guys on the West Coast may be grabbing breakfast, but we appreciate you joining us and hope you have a great rest of your day.