Home › Markets › Trade Flows & Shipping
Trade flows, vessels and containers
A price is only half of an import decision. The other half is whether the cargo arrives this week or next month — so we track the shipment as closely as we track the market.
What we cover in trade flows
Container tracking
Follow a container by number across carrier and terminal systems: current status, route events, port-by-port timing and the vessel leg it is riding on.
Vessel movements
Search by name, IMO or MMSI for position, voyage details, ETA and port calls — useful long before your cargo is discharged.
Terminal & port status
Karachi and Port Qasim terminal inquiries, including bill of lading and container status from the terminals your cargo actually clears through.
Import & export context
Trade-flow visibility that shows what is moving, where from and in what volume — the demand signal behind the price move.
Freight cost awareness
Ocean freight is a real line in your landed cost. Track it alongside the commodity so your quote reflects the whole delivered number.
Exception alerts
Get told when a shipment slips, a vessel diverts or a container sits longer than it should — before your customer calls to ask.
Port activity
What is arriving, and how busy the port is
Before your own cargo sails, the useful question is what the port already has in front of it. We record that every day, for the ports of Pakistan and the Gulf.
Port arrivals — Karachi & Port Qasim
The vessels expected, waiting at anchorage and working on the berths, as the port authorities list them each day — with cargo, tonnage, origin and berth, and a running total by commodity.
Daily port traffic — forty ports
Ship calls each day at forty ports in Pakistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, split by tanker, dry bulk, container, general cargo and ro-ro, with estimated import and export tonnage and three years of history.
Sea lanes
Daily transits through the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and the Suez Canal, with tankers counted separately — the first place a supply shock shows up.
Port traffic is built from satellite ship tracking. The counts are of ships, and the tonnages are estimates of what they carried, not figures declared by the ports. It runs about a week behind the calendar.
Why it matters
Landed cost, not headline price
Importers do not buy a benchmark; they buy a delivered tonne. When the commodity price, the freight and the arrival date live in three different systems, the real number never gets calculated until it is too late to act on it.
- One view of price and cargo. The market data and the shipment status in the same platform.
- Fewer status calls. Your team stops phoning the forwarder for an update that a screen can answer.
- Demurrage avoided. Knowing arrival and free-time early is the cheapest risk control in the business.
- Customer confidence. Answer "where is my order" with a timestamp instead of an estimate.
Illustrative view. Live tracking is provisioned per client account.
Track the cargo, not just the market
See how price intelligence and shipment tracking work together on one screen.