Re:The U.S. can now set its own rates for mail from China an...
by madaxe_again on Monday June 29, 2020 @04:00AM
(#23675489)
No, that's about right - containerised freight is extremely cheap. I just shipped an ATV, about 1.5m3, 250kg, from China to Europe for about $180 - and $150 of that is port handling and freight forwarding fees, the actual shipping part was $32.
Re:The U.S. can now set its own rates for mail from China an...
by hef19898 on Monday June 29, 2020 @04:15AM
(#23675535)
Just last week I checked ocean freight rates again for a project of mine. Depending on ports and incoterms, handling charges, port fess, etc on both ends can almost amount to the same sum as the shipping part.
Re:The U.S. can now set its own rates for mail from China an...
by imtringued on Monday June 29, 2020 @07:46AM
(#23676652)
Most of the cost comes from land based shipping which you conveniently ignored.
Large container ships hold 14,000 TEU (twenty-foot-equiv) containers, each of which has a volume of 33m^3.
Let's use an iPhone's size as a stand-in for the phone cover: it's 173 x 70 x 8mm.
Divide the first by the latter: (14000 * 33m^3) / (143mm * 71mm 8mm), and, as google will helpfully tell us (https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&sxsrf=ALe...) you can ship 5.6x10^9, or 5.6 billion of these on a single ship.
From some related information it seems shipping rates for a single container are around $1,000 for China->US. Plug that in and the costs are ... $0.002, or 1/5th of a cent: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&sxsrf=ALe...
I may be off by an order of magnitude somewhere. But it just feels intuitively obvious that most of the costs of any delivery are incurred during the 15 seconds or so the mailman spends in your driveway or trying to find the mailbox with your name.