Laptops en route to Europe by rail for first time

Imagine if you will that it's late August, you pile a million laptops (number used as an illustration only) on a boat and send them on their 40 day journey to Europe. You send them at the end of August so they're in stock for the start of the Christmas buying season and distributed within each country in plenty of time.

Suddenly the economy collapses! Your laptops are still on the boats, but now they will have no one to buy them. You've committed too many resources to this year's sales and you're going to face a profit reduction. All over Europe piles of your laptops will linger in shop inventories, unsold and unloved.

If only you'd had another 3 weeks in which to gauge the state of the market! You could have shipped only half as many and kept the rest as parts which you sold on or used in next year's bargain models!

And that's why it's a glut and not a dearth.

Have you thought of the weather onboard a ship?

If temperature was an issue, the laptops could be put in a reefer container. These can be used to warm as well as cool cargo. They would have to plug into the train's power supply as the diesel for their GenSets would probably freeze at -40C.

I see this as a stopgap, rather than a regular service, as the capacity of a train is far below that of a ship, and it costs a lot more.

Where does 40 days come from? All our services take 28 days from Kaohsiung to Hamburg. O.K. still twice the train time, but less likely to be delayed by ice/leaves/buffalo, etc. on the line. Also, they still have to be shipped from Taiwan to the mainland to be put on a train, so there is still the time/cost of loading/unloading a ship involved. Add in the fact that ocean rates are rock bottom at present and you wonder how long the rail service will continue.

There are good reasons why most of the world's goods travel by ship.

not snowed in, just cold

"Snowed in" means cut off due to impenetrable snow. The Trans-Sib doesn't get cut off for months - if it did, it would me a major security and economic problem for the Russian state. It operates throughout winter. It is, however, pretty cold.

Is cold weather that much of a problem for laptop transportation so long as you don't try to use them? Laptops are, presumably, distributed for sale across Russia in winter already.