Shipping and Freight Rate#
The most widely applied method of calculating how much it costs to ship a container load from A to B is using a container index. The common container indices are calculated as $/40ft container. The current datasource used for this analysis is the Freightos Baltic Index.
The FBX01 freight container index measures 40′ container prices across key port pairs from China or East Asia to North America’s West Coast. Key ports in the index include Shanghai (PVG) and Ningbo (NGB) in China and Los Angeles (LAX) and Chicago (ORD) in the United States. This index is created in collaboration with the Baltic Exchange.
This trade lane is key for global trade, as China is the 3rd largest global importer, with a total of Y percent of trade to the North American West Coast.