Sea freight can be a great tool in your arsenal when it comes to managing your supply chain, but many companies overlook it when it could benefit them the most. Not only is it a very cost-efficient option, but there are ranges of ways that it can help your business operate smoothly.
1. Cost
Sea Freight is one of the more cost-effective ways to move a large amount of product all at once, whether those are individual items for sale or larger bundled supplies that are all being moved to the same destination. Compared to air freight, it can be cheaper when moving items in bulk.
For example, if your company needs to move a large number of items from one country to another, then using ocean freight transport services can massively reduce the cost you pay per item. The more items you are shipping at once, the more affordable this becomes.
While this does mean that it becomes more expensive to ship smaller amounts of stock, it also means that you are not paying as much for heavier items. Cars are a good example: while businesses may not be moving many at once, they are still cheaper to move all together on a ship rather than via air freight.
2. Weight
Larger or heavier items are very hard to deal with. Like the car example above, a larger item can be tough to transport by air, and there are not really any other options for getting them from place to place. Using sea freight, the weight becomes far less important, making bulk transport far easier.
This goes for any heavy or larger-scale items, including raw materials. Pallets of bricks or slabs of metal can be moved through ocean freight without needing to take any special measures or find specific kinds of ships, which works well considering how much the average freight ship can hold.
These ships can boast incredibly high weight limits and very few restrictions on their cargo, making them an excellent way to move both extreme amounts of light products and heavier individual items. Of course, the rules are different for each ship, so you still need to follow them at all times.
3. Waste
One of the lesser-known benefits of sea and ocean freight services is reduced carbon usage. While ships can often have quite large physical engines, the efficiency of the way that they transport items makes them far more environmentally friendly.
For example, ocean freight services may allow you to take hundreds of pallets of industrial tools, supplies, and materials overseas all at once. Air travel might seem cheaper upfront, but that can require multiple trips, and no aircraft will hold the same amount as a freight ship.
This can mean that the single overseas freight will come out cheaper than multiple trips by air, even if the cost of air travel was a third of the ocean freight costs. Sea and ocean freight services are not suited to every kind of task, but if you need to move a lot of items within a tight budget, then they become the perfect choice for your business.