With the growing competition and saturation in the freight forwarding market, the rates are showing further fluctuations making settling for a specific reference freight forwarding rate practically impossible. However, you need to base your understanding of the rates by looking into what constitutes the final freight rate forwarders provide you. To better understand, let us break  it down into the dynamic dependants: 

 

1. General Rate Increase

Among all the other factors, market forces including supply, demand and economic situations remain on top of the rate drivers as per the huge impact they have on respective charges. The greater the demand and lower the supply, the higher those rates spike and vice versa. In addition, shipping rates are heavily impacted by demand, including seasonal ones. Therefore, your location, industry, political and economical state of both countries, legalities, seasons and a major number of other external factors are all seasonal and gross changes that may lead to freight rates inflation as per the capacity offered.

 

2. Fuel Cost

It logically stands that whenever there is a raise in the fuel’s cost, carriers and transporters must automatically raise their prices as well to compensate for the losses and maintain a constant profit to function their business. As the carrier’s cost increases, they start demanding more from freight forwarders especially when it comes to air freight, so keep an eye on fuel prices to correlate with the rates. But you wouldn’t need to bother yourself with this data as we can handle the data carriage for you and benchmark your rates according to this criteria. 

 

3. Shippers and Delivery Charges

In the end, forwarders take all the direct contact with shippers and transporters, saving you all the hassle. That being said, the moment a transporter decides to raise their rates, UTA SAL among other forwarders are forced to do so to cover the costs demanded to transport your cargo. 

 

4. Lead or Transit Time definition to start with 

Lead time in shipment refers to the amount of time between when an order is placed and when it is delivered to the customer. Increasing the lead time could only help by reducing costs. Whenever you give a lower lead time to your shippers and forwarders, they will eventually be more time bound and short-noticed causing the rates to increase as well. 

 

Final Thoughts..

All factors that might drive freight rates could make any forwarding business to change their rates, however your choices should be well-studied upon a well-certified and trust-worthy platform which also belongs to highly functioning freight networks. So request a quote now to know what your goods might cost with UTA’s forwarding rates through all those fluctuations. Which speaking of, where do you think are these fluctuations heading to?