Damco’s high profile realignment with Maersk Line has been making headlines —and its strategic moves on NYSHEX are making customers especially happy this peak season.

We sat down with Damco’s Head of Ocean Product for the East Area, Matthew Koivisto, recently to discuss their unprecedented level of trading on the exchange this year, how NYSHEX fits into their strategy and where they see things headed.

First off, Damco has been buying NYSHEX contracts like crazy—so much so that right dab in the middle of our phone interview, yet another contract came through, bought by someone on their team.

This peak season they adopted a decisive NYSHEX strategy to anticipate the annual surge in demand for space. And according to Koivisto, it’s worked, “We got a lot of interest, and we had one or two customers commit in advance to making bookings with us using NYSHEX.”

Their advanced planning has paid off in ways no one expected, too. When trade tariffs were announced, Damco used NYSHEX to help customers to get ahead of the tariffs that were taking affect. Read the case study for all the details.

Damco has been a member and advocate of NYSHEX since the beginning and they’ve had a front row view of the exchange’s transformation and success. “It used to be that there were just one or maybe two carriers in some lanes making slots available with a relatively restricted set of lane pairs. There weren’t too many options out there,” Koivisto explains. “But now, the past couple of months in particular, it’s becoming much more widespread in terms of the lane pair offerings and carriers that are out there.”

As a result, Koivisto says NYSHEX has become part of his team’s routine, “During this peak season in particular, I’ve been going in and logging in every day to take a pulse to see what’s available and, you know, if we see a deal out there, and if we think we’re going to have demand, we’ll buy it up.”

Damco is happy with its strategy on NYSHEX and feeling confident about the next capacity crunch. “Well, it’s nice to have a solution available for a customer that works and that we can offer them. I mean, it wasn’t available just a couple of years ago, where the only thing we could really do is just make an FAK booking at a really high rate and hope for the best—and half the time that booking might get rolled during a peak situation,” Koivisto explains. “But now we’ve actually got a more secure way of offering a booking during peak season that we know is going to sail and a lot of our customers are starting to embrace that.”

If you are looking for a competitive advantage and to add to your bottom line like Damco, become a member today!