project44 is excited to welcome Ocean Insights to our p44 team. After a turbulent year for supply chains around the world, ocean container tracking and analytics has never been more critical. project44 looked to the market leader, Ocean Insights, to bolster our ocean visibility solution.
Throughout this process, I have had the pleasure to work closely with the leadership team at Ocean Insights, including CEO and CTO Felix Richter, Chief Commercial Officer Robin Jaacks, Chief Operations Officer Josh Brazil and CFO Stefan Gamm. These conversations confirmed that together we can offer a better solution for our customers. We realized that by joining two leading visibility solutions, we could redefine the value of end-to-end supply chain visibility.
Why Ocean Insights? And why now? I wanted to share some thoughts about why this acquisition is so important for our business and customers, and why Ocean Insights is the perfect partner to join the p44 team.
Why Ocean Visibility Should be a Priority for Shippers
After a slowdown on imports last year, ocean freight quickly took a turn in 2020 as supply chains started to replenish inventory while global consumers shifted to a homebody economy. American imports from China have increased as more are staying home and online shopping on top of increased demand for medical and personal protective equipment (PPE).
This demand has caused several challenges for ocean freight, including a container shortage and increased shipping rates. An article by Ocean Insights explained, “A rise in demand is now causing extreme container shortages especially on the Asia/Pacific trade lanes. That shortage is causing a practice of deadheading shipping containers in favor of getting them back to Asia where the demand is high and carriers command a premium for shipments.”
On top of these challenges, many ports are seeing unprecedented congestion, especially US West Coast ports. October 2020 was the busiest month in the Port of LA’s 114-year history, and in February 2021, many ships are still left to anchor for several days without knowing when they’ll be able to dock.
These delays don’t stop at the port — they have a real impact throughout the supply chain. For example, Peloton made headlines for significantly increasing their supply chain investment and moving from ocean freight to air because they were struggling to meet customer demands.
Ocean freight is a linchpin for global shippers. Lack of predictability into a container’s location or ETA can start a domino effect throughout the rest of the shipment’s journey.
Why project44 Acquired Ocean Insights
While we’re hopeful these container and port roadblocks will ease soon, the last year has exposed several weak points for supply chains. We believe our customers need a single supply chain visibility solution across all modes and geographies to remain agile today and well into the future.
As we looked at our solutions and product roadmap, we decided that we needed to deliver the most robust ocean visibility for our customers to be successful. Ocean Insights was the natural fit to extend our exiting ocean solution with deep data and integrations.
Headquartered in Germany and founded in 2012, Ocean Insights is the industry leader for real-time ocean visibility and market intelligence. They pioneered ocean freight visibility by combining carrier data, live vessel tracking and sailing schedule data and is one of the most trusted and fastest growing visibility providers on the market.
Tracking 350,000 containers daily, Ocean Insights offers track and trace functionality across more than 55 shipping lines, 700 seaports, and more than 5,000 vessels as well as handling over five million sailing schedule changes per day. While many visibility providers depend on third parties for ocean tracking data, Ocean Insights has built native integrations with shipping lines and ports to ingest data directly from the source.
While project44 entered the ocean visibility space several years ago, Ocean Insights was the market leader. Having started with over-the-road visibility, project44 has built the world’s largest over-the-road carrier network with connections to more than 800 ELD/telematics devices.
By combining Ocean Insights’ data with project44’s existing ocean visibility product as well as leading over-the-road, rail, and air visibility solutions, the acquisition will expand global and multi-modal supply chain visibility capabilities.
The Future of Ocean Visibility
We’re thrilled to bring the Ocean Insights team on board at project44. When working with Felix, Robin, Josh, Stefan and others at Ocean Insights, it was important to all of us that our companies had similar values. We are working closely to ensure this transition is as seamless as possible for our employees, customers, and partners.
Once integrated, we will deliver the strongest ocean freight visibility product through native integrations, high-fidelity data, and advanced analytics. By strengthening this product, project44 will offer the market’s first native, global, and multi-modal visibility solution at a time when real-time visibility has never been more critical to the entire supply chain industry.
We can’t wait to get this solution in the hands of our customers! To learn more about the acquisition, feel free to reach out to the project44 team.