Seaport handling problems and containership delays - temporary congestion surcharge

‍Unfortunately, an improvement of the current situation in the seaports is not in sight and continues to be very tense. Since the beginning of the year, this has also had a fundamental impact on the work of Roland Spedition. In particular, this has made the handling of our trains in seaport hinterland traffic more difficult.

Through internal optimizations, we have managed to partially compensate for the resulting additional costs. However, the situation has become increasingly aggravated and is currently leading to a further unsustainable negative development on our cost side.

The following external factors are causing constant increases in transportation costs:

• Ship delays and unscheduled ship arrivals, as well as changed ship rotations
• Higher costs in the areas of infrastructure, personnel and energy
• Unbalanced traffic between import and exports, as well as extreme volatility of volumes in general
• Congestion at ports or hinterland terminals
• Loss of capacity and turnarounds – due to train layouts required at short notice due to unscheduled loading stops and bottlenecks

It is particularly important to us to continue to offer our customers the best possible service and the accustomed flexibility, even in times of constantly rising costs. In order to be able to operate our train systems between the Austrian terminals (Enns, Vienna, Graz and Salzburg) and the German seaports (Hamburg, Bremerhaven and Wilhelmshaven) economically and predictable for you – we are now unfortunately forced to charge a surcharge of EUR 15.–/TEU from October 01, 2021 until further notice. This surcharge reflects only a small portion of the additional costs, which we can now, however, due to the present external circumstances no longer disregard.

For further questions we are as before personally at your disposal.

Thank you for your understanding.