CargoSmart portal stakes up for grabs

Hong Kong-based Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) wants to sell stakes in its CargoSmart Internet portal, and last week announced that it is in discussions with five Asian carriers.
Ken Chih, OOCL’s chief information officer, said: “We’ve just signed a three-year deal with Hewlett Packard (HP) for it to host CargoSmart. We recognised that if a neutral
party didn’t host it, we wouldn’t get other carriers using it.”
OOCL has set a 30 June deadline for the carriers to decide whether they want to
take up to a 20% of the portal.
HP is due to start managing the system from the beginning of July and potential investors will then be limited to a maximum 5% stake.
“We’ve got a special offer on until the deadline, after that I’m jacking the price up,” said Chili. However, two of the five carriers may be unable to meet the deadline. They are already members of rival portal GT Nexus, and a clause in their contracts bars them from
investing in other portals.
Chili claimed it was the carriers’ customers who forced the pace on CargoSmart. “Clients are insisting that they join. If they can’t or don’t want to take a stake, then they can become users.
“The customers decide what portal to use – if, for example, they want Cargo-Smart to link up with GT Nexus, we’ll do it.”
Ultimately, CargoSmart will become a separate company with its own CEO. “Some carriers said that if we’d shown them this before, then they wouldn’t have invested in other
portals,” he said. Joint-venture portals were difficult to develop, he added, because of the continuing need for partners to find a consensus.
Of the remaining three lines negotiating with OOCL, one is Cosco and the others are also said to be Asian.
Malaysian International Shipping Company (MISC), China Shipping, NYK and Evergreen are the major Asian lines that have not yet signed up to GT Nexus or Inttra.