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New Case - ACS INC. d.b.a. American Cargoservice, Inc., San Diego, USA

We were contacted by our WCA partners Civaro Lanka in June to assist them with a project involving the move of two Kobelco  SK480 excavators weighing 49,000 kgs each from Savannah to Colombo. Their client wanted to save on shipping costs by removing the boom, arm, and bucket from  both excavators and have the shipper load these together in a 40HC container, while the main units moved by flat rack.

After speaking with numerous carriers, we received an offer from Hanjin Shipping to ship the container with the removed parts, and the main units to ship on two 40’ flat racks.

A complicating factor in the project was that there were two U.S. shippers, each having a separate L/C for payment. Both shippers were unfamiliar with the use of L/C’s, and asked us to contact their banks regarding the L/C’s, as well as prepare and present documents.

We were also involved in discussions with both Civaro and the sellers regarding who would accept the responsibility and costs of properly securing the excavators on the flat racks, and how the L/C’s could be amended so that the sellers were responsible only to deliver to our CFS at Savannah, since they were not comfortable with standard FOB terms.

Only days before we planned to deliver to Hanjin, they informed us they had used incorrect information regarding the payload limit of the flatracks, using the gross weight limit of 45,000 kgs as the payload. With this correction, they informed us they could not accept the excavators for flat rack shipment and would have to quote as breakbulk instead! After some discussion with the shippers, in order to avoid the much higher cost of breakbulk shipment, the shipper informed us he could remove the counterweights from the excavators in order to reduce the weight to acceptable limits for flatrack shipment.

With some last-minute changes of plan to accept the counterweights, which weighed 10,000 kgs each, at our CFS for loading into another container, we were able to get the excavators on board as planned.