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FEDERAZIONE NAZIONALE DELLE IMPRESE DI SPEDIZIONI INTERNAZIONALI

FEDESPEDI

WHO IS FEDESPEDI Established in June 1946, FEDESPEDI - Federazione Nazionale delle Imprese di Spedizioni Internazionali - is the Federation of the Italian Freight Forwarding companies. Fedespedi currently is the trade association in the field of transport representing and safeguarding the interests of almost all international freight forwarders in Italy. Our members are engaged in the national and international movement of freight by all modes of transport (road, rail, sea, air), having deep knowledge and professionalism within the supply chain and a natural vocation towards internationalization. Most of our members are referred to as “Multimodal Transport Operators” or “Logistics Service Providers”: stakeholders which are able to plan, deal with and safeguard the whole freight forwarding business and to take care of the interests of their customers, providing a considerable role within the Italian economic system. FEDESPEDI NUMBERS Fedespedi represents ab (...)

Lobbying Activity

Response to Evaluation of the Consortia Block Exemption Regulation

3 Oct 2022

FEDESPEDI, the federation representing the interests of the Italian freight forwarding companies, calls on the European Commission not to renew the CBER, replacing it, instead, by sector-specific guidelines to ensure that the competition law framework for vessel sharing agreements is transparent and enforceable. Although the CBER may have been justified two decades ago, container liner shipping consortia meeting the CBER conditions no longer satisfy with a sufficient degree of certainty all four conditions of Article 101(3) TFEU under current and expected market conditions. The market has radically changed with market concentration connected with digital information services and vertical integration of supply chain functions, at the expense of the users of liner services, and ultimately consumers. The role of the European Commission should be to guarantee a true level playing field, through defining transparent and effective monitoring systems that avoid oligopolistic behavior, in order to protect the efficiency of the supply chain. Ensuring pluralism and competition in the logistics sector is a duty of the institutions and an advantage for the economy of the Old Continent, which has its beating heart in small and medium-sized enterprises. The competitiveness of companies cannot be separated from a market environment in which the rules apply to everyone: competition. We are not against the free market, quite the contrary. However, we ask to compete on equal terms, and we want to see common rules in place and that they are respected. Experience has shown that consortia can be formed and can operate successfully without a Block Exemption Regulation. A large number of consortia fall clearly outside the scope of the CBER. Similar forms of cooperation also exist in other economic sectors, most notably the airline industry. In any future arrangement the European Commission needs to monitor the extent of data sharing and coordinated activity within consortia, and ensure they are confined to what is indispensable for the negotiation and performance of consortia agreements. And last but not least, FEDESPEDI supports the submission of CLECAT.
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Response to Prolongation of the Consortia Block Exemption Regulation

20 Dec 2019

CONTRIBUTION OF FEDESPEDI TO THE CONSULTATION ON THE PROPOSED PROLONGATION OF THE CONSORTIA BLOCK EXEMPTION REGULATION FEDESPEDI welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the consultation on the Roadmap “Prolongation of the Consortia Block Exemption Regulation” and the Draft Regulation prolonging the Consortia BER (the “Consortia Regulation)”, Regulation 906/2009. FEDESPEDI expresses its strong disagreement with the fact that the Commission has proposed to prolong the Consortia BER as it is, clearly dismissing the position of the users of liner shipping services that, in their reply to the stakeholder consultation of last year, called for a repeal of the BER, as the current framework is obsolete, given that most of the carriers operate in alliances and that the market concentration is increasing. At the same time, an important condition for the exemption, which is to provide benefits to the customers, is no longer met, as neither service quality nor productivity have improved over the years. Instead, users of liner shipping services and their service providers have suffered from an increasingly unbalanced market situation since carriers entered into major cooperation agreements. Given these market developments and having requested a serious review of the BER, which is extremely generous towards the liner shipping industry, users regret that the Commission has not taken into consideration the arguments of an important range of stakeholders in the maritime supply chain, all of them having serious problems with the current BER. FEDESPEDI calls for more transparency, considering that the Commission itself in the evaluation paper recognises that there is no accurate data regarding the Consortia BER and that it is therefore difficult to assess whether some consortia are below the 30% in terms of their market share.
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