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Danish shipping giant AP Moller-Maersk and tech giant IBM have discontinued TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled global trade platform. Launched in 2018, the platform aimed to bring together various parties to support information sharing, transparency, and industry-wide innovation.
The TradeLens ecosystem consisted of over 700 companies, including major ocean carriers representing over two-thirds of the global market, and was integrated with leading trade finance banks in multiple countries to help modernise the trade finance industry.
The platform has tracked more than 55 million container shipments, 4.7 billion events, and more than 25 million published documents.
Digital bill of lading
The platform was critical for shipping as only 0.1 per cent of original bills of lading are digitised. With the availability of an end-to-end software-as-a-service solution via TradeLens for trade finance transactions, original bills could have moved to paperless processes for all involved, say officials in the shipping industry.
“TradeLens was founded on the bold vision to make a leap in global supply chain digitisation as an open and neutral industry platform. Unfortunately, while we successfully developed a viable platform, the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved. As a result, TradeLens has not reached the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business,” Maersk said.
Rotem Hershko, Head of Business Platforms at AP Moller-Maersk, said, “Starting today, the TradeLens team is taking action to withdraw the offerings and discontinue the platform, and the intent is that the platform will go offline by end of quarter one, 2023. During this process all parties involved will ensure that customers are attended to without disruptions to their businesses.”
“We will leverage the work of TradeLens as a stepping stone to further push our digitisation agenda and look forward to harnessing the energy and ability of our technology talent in new ways,” said Hershko.
Blockchain in supply chain
As part of TradeLens, over 100 organisations were involved or agreed to participate on the platform built on open standards. Globally, over 20 port and terminal operators, including PSA Singapore, International Container Terminal Services Inc, Patrick Terminals, Modern Terminals in Hong Kong, Port of Halifax, Port of Rotterdam, Port of Bilbao, PortConnect, PortBase, and Holt Logistics at the Port of Philadelphia were part of the solution, a release in 2018 had said.
In February this year, TradeLens announced the completion of a letter of credit transacted with HSBC and Syngenta using a digital bill of lading underpinned by blockchain technology.
Agrichemical products were shipped from South Korea to Bangladesh using a paperless process. This demonstrated an important step in modernising trade finance and supply chain efficiency.
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