This is how Hapag-Lloyd will soon find its containers again

Installation takes less than three minutes. A mechanic cleans a small area on the right-hand door of the steel box in the CMR container depot in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg, drills two holes in the steel and fixes a small, orange box with rivets. From now on, the container has a kind of electronic ankle bracelet, in technical jargon this box is called a live tracking or IoT device. The location of the transport container can thus be traced worldwide, for its owner, the Hapag-Lloyd shipping company, and for its customers.

With the preparation of some containers on Tuesday, Germany's largest shipping company - number five in the world - as the first leading player in container shipping, according to its own statements, is starting to completely equip its container fleet. A total of 1.6 million standard boxes – the equivalent of three million container units (TEU) – are to be fitted with the tracking systems. Hapag-Lloyd has already equipped all refrigerated containers – around 300,000 TEU – with it in recent years.

Basically, the worldwide movements of the containers are controlled by the fact that each transport box has its own unique identifier made up of letters and numbers. The shipping companies, the port terminals and the transport customers use this to book the respective containers in and out of their systems. However, it has not yet been possible to see exactly where and in what condition a container is actually located in this way. At Hapag-Lloyd, this should now be possible quickly and across the board.

Hapag-Lloyd is having its entire container fleet converted in around 200 container depots worldwide. The corresponding service for tracking is to be activated for customers in the course of the coming year, and most of the containers should have received a tracking box by the end of 2023.

"The containers that leave the depot with a tracking device are fully visible to us and, in a next step, also to our customers - regardless of whether they are on a truck, train or barge or are in a warehouse," said in Wilhelmsburg Maximilian Rothkopf, the Hapag-Lloyd board member responsible for day-to-day business. "We believe that greater transparency has the potential to better manage strained supply chains to the benefit of our customers."

The tracking devices provide a variety of data. In addition to the locations of the containers, they measure the ambient temperature and monitor sudden vibrations in the boxes. The tracking devices generate electricity for their batteries from solar modules on the containers. The batteries last a maximum of 90 days, this duration is particularly important for the time below deck on board the ships. When moving, the tracking boxes report the position every hour, when at rest less frequently. The Hapag-Lloyd containers will initially be equipped with devices from the manufacturer Nexxiot, and from the end of the year also from the manufacturer Orbcomm.

“We are now taking the first steps of a large-scale project. In this first introductory phase, it is important to optimize all processes together with our IoT partners in order to exploit the full potential of the technology," says Andrea Schöning, Senior Director Container Steering, effectively the head of the container fleet at Hapag-Lloyd. "At the same time, we want to make the product available to our customers quickly, as they need and increasingly expect this type of digitized solution."

The market for locating and tracking containers and their conditions has been growing for years. The severe disruptions in the supply chains since the beginning of the pandemic are also stimulating business. Not only leading shipping companies such as Hapag-Lloyd, Mærsk or CMA CGM work with the movement data of containers, but also service providers such as the Hamburg company Ocean Insights. Using its own software, it prepares movement data from global trade in such a way that many can use it commercially - players in the transport industry, senders and recipients of goods, banks, insurance companies or business institutes. The "raw material" for this are the positions of ships collected by AIS or GPS, container data from port terminals or also content information from manufacturers and customers.