According to officials at the private operators of Oakland’s shipping terminals, boxes in the port had piled up due to the one-week blocking from truckers and they are doing all that they can to clear these containers.

Bill Aboudi, president of trucking company Oakland Port Services Corp., said when he tried to make an appointment to pick up containers early Monday, he found the earliest slot available was Tuesday night. That’s crazy. Everybody was trying to get a week’s worth of work done within one day. That’s unfeasible. Nothing will be normal for another few weeks.

After protesters didn’t show up on Saturday during the port’s limited weekend hours, activities started to recover. On Monday as business boosted again, the trucks blocking the gate of the Port of Oakland were removed.

The port warned, in an open letter to the protesters, their behavior—blocking the gate breached the new state law which states that protests shall be conducted within designated zones and they could be “cited and penalized” by police.

Able Zerfiel, one of the protesters, said they moved to the limited zone to show their annoyance without blocking the gate after the police threatened to act.

The new law the truckers protest is known as AB5, which makes those owner-operators in the trucking industry in California hard and extremely expensive to be independent. That’s why some of an estimated 70,000 independent truckers objected it.

According to Ed DeNike, president of SSA Containers which normally handles about 8,000 to 9,000 containers weekly, the key issue was that all the containers off ships were crammed in the yard as no one came to pick them up. But as the gate is open and they can do the job now, we have more capacity in the yard now.

Shipping experts said UPS’s expanded parcel network and the online retail giant’s growing in-house logistics operation would likely provide enough capacity to avoid shipping delays after Fedex announced it hadn’t renewed its contract with Amazon.

FedEx Corp.’s split with Amazon.com Inc. is expected to deliver a holiday e-commerce boost to rival United Parcel Service Inc., the U.S. Postal Service and regional package carriers as other providers pick up the slack.

Shipping experts said UPS’s expanded parcel network and the online retail giant’s growing in-house logistics operation would likely provide enough capacity to avoid delivery delays during the busy peak season. Regional delivery operators like OnTrac and LaserShip Inc. could also get a holiday bump from overflow volumes, they said.

“I think Amazon is going to have a little bit of a scramble to fill some of these voids, but there certainly is plenty of capacity in the industry,” said Tim Sailor, founder and principal of Navigo Consulting Group Inc., which advises businesses on shipping costs.

FedEx announced Wednesday that it hadn’t renewed its contract with Amazon for deliveries through its ground network, adding to an earlier decision to drop Amazon from its Express service.

FedEx has said that Amazon represented less than 1.3% of its total revenue last year, or less than $1 billion. About 80% of that business was in the domestic air shipping contract segment, whose contract with Amazon ended in June, Morgan Stanley analyst Ravi Shanker said in a Wednesday research note.

“In terms of ground volume, FedEx was not doing much with Amazon anyway,” said Cathy Roberson, founder and chief analyst at Logistics Trends & Insights LLC. “They weren’t making their margins with Amazon. Amazon is a very demanding customer, and they can use that to get better rates, to the detriment of their supply-chain partners.”

FedEx declined to comment beyond its statement Wednesday: “This change is consistent with our strategy to focus on the broader e-commerce market.”
An Amazon spokeswoman said FedEx “has been a great partner over the years” and that the company is “confident in our ability to serve customers.”

Some Amazon customers complained about shipping delays during the company’s Prime Day shopping extravaganza in July. The online retailer shipped roughly 100 million packages over the week of the sale, according to an estimate by parcel consulting firm SJ Consulting Group Inc., or more than 14 million packages a day.

“That’s a pretty big number,” said SJ Consulting President Satish Jindel. He said Amazon is rapidly ramping up its network of contract providers to handle last-mile deliveries, and its growing fleet of leased planes will help fill in the gaps from the severed FedEx contract.
“UPS would be delighted to handle” the extra volumes, Mr. Jindel said. The U.S. Postal Service, which he estimates handled 28% of Amazon’s shipments last month, “is going to look at it and say, ‘Thank you, Amazon.’”

A UPS spokesman said the company doesn’t comment on specific customer discussions and that no customer makes up more than 10% of UPS revenue.
Picking up those extra Amazon volumes will heighten carriers’ risks should the online retailer take more business in-house in the future, said Jerry Hempstead, a former parcel-industry executive and principal of e-commerce delivery consultant Hempstead Consulting.

“I’m sure that long-term UPS will be handling less packages,” Mr. Hempstead said. “If Amazon has a truck coming to my house, why would they pay UPS to do that?…They have their own trucks now, they have their own planes, and the writing’s on the wall.”

The Chinese state-run ocean carrier  had bought part of debt-ridden PIL’s container-manufacturing business, and executives at the Chinese carrier believe they could wrap up a deal for the entire business if family-owned PIL’s owners decide to sell, reported WSJ.

Cosco Shipping is looking  to expand its footprint in developing markets and a take over would be an edge towards deeper logistics services beyond conventional ocean shipping, with a distinctive Asian focus.

According to Paris container research house Alphaliner, if such a deal went through, it would place Cosco very close to the Mediterranean Shipping Co’s (MSC) 3.73 million TEU capacity and ranking as the world’s No 2 carrier.

“Cosco remains the front-runner in any potential takeover of PIL, due to close historical ties and the complementary route network,” said Alphaliner.

“Although PIL has repeatedly denied it is for sale, it remains an attractive takeover target with an established market presence in the Africa, Latin America, Middle East, South Pacific and intra-Asia trades,” it added.

However, the two operators aren’t in formal acquisition talks.

PIL is run by the Teo family and company Chairman Teo Siong Seng is a board member of Cosco’s Hong Kong-listed container-shipping flagship unit. PIL relies on the Chinese operator to charter ships.

The shipping line has been in financial distress for a couple of years. PIL faces $1.08 billion in payments on short-term debt this June and is carrying a total of $3.46 billion in debt, Alphaliner said.