What this is
The SINO Lane Tracker is a monthly snapshot of 26 China-origin shipping lanes — rates SINO Shipping actually quoted to its customers, aggregated and published as a public benchmark for journalists, analysts, and shippers who need a directional read on emerging-market freight flows.
What this is NOT
It is not a multi-carrier index. It is not a market average. It is not a FBXFreightos Baltic Index — the public daily container-freight index quoted by FT, Bloomberg, JOC. Aggregates rates from 30+ carriers and forwarders worldwide. or Drewry WCIDrewry World Container Index — public weekly index covering 8 major East–West routes. competitor. Those indices aggregate quotes from many carriers and shippers, follow IOSCOInternational Organization of Securities Commissions — sets benchmark standards (IOSCO Principles) that public financial indices like FBX comply with./BMREU Benchmarks Regulation — European framework for index benchmarks used in financial contracts; sets governance and methodology rules. rules (the regime financial indices operate under), and produce values that derivatives desks trade on. Our scope is different.
This is one forwarder's read of the market it serves. The method is published so it can be checked.
Source data
Every entry is sourced from SINO Shipping's own quotation desk. Rates reflect what we quoted to real customers during the month. We do not buy third-party data, we do not scrape carrier price sheets, and we do not interpolate where we have no booking signal. Where a lane was inactive during the month (no quotation requests), we mark it as "Get a quote" rather than fabricate a value.
Calibration vs FBX and Drewry
Out of the 9 editorial-pool lanes,
8 overlap with FBX or Drewry WCI routes
(China → North Europe, China → Mediterranean, China → North America East/West Coast,
China → Persian Gulf, China → South America East/West Coast, etc.). On those lanes, we
publish a monthly delta vs the public index value. A persistent
|delta| > 25% on a calibrated lane triggers a methodology review.
The remaining ~1 editorial lanes — Middle Corridor (Kazakhstan rail, Uzbekistan, Caucasus), East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Djibouti, Mozambique), MENA secondary (Jordan, Oman), and South-East Asia secondary (Cambodia, Philippines secondary, Myanmar) — have no public benchmark. That's the coverage gap this tracker exists to close.
Weekly market intelligence is cross-checked via the European-Asian Alliance (EAA) Network, where SINO sits on the board. The EAA's weekly "Did you know that" briefings surface carrier earnings, port investments, capacity-discipline signals, and chokepoint cascades that the public indices don't cover — context we cite inside each monthly story when it sharpens the SINO desk read.