The ERAI index—which tracks what it costs to move a transit container across Kazakhstan, Russia, and Belarus on the China–Europe–China route—is to be built into a full marketing tool for the Eurasian overland transport corridors, according to Rail-news.kz.
The proposals came from UTLC ERA, which developed the index, and were put to a meeting of the Coordinating Council on Trans-Siberian Transportation.
The road map calls for an independent administrator to run the index, and for the methodology to be tightened and widened—sub-indices for individual routes, and a multimodal index that would follow the price of a door-to-door move along the whole chain.
That would make the market more transparent, bring in new shippers, and put the Eurasian overland corridors on a stronger competitive footing. It would also give the market analytics it can actually read, make comparison with ocean rates straightforward, and shorten the time a logistics decision takes.
As it stands, ERAI rests on nine groups of indicators—rail tariffs, flatcar lease rates, terminal and forwarding services, the balance of loaded and empty containers, train utilization, and others. What it is not, in its present form, is a full market benchmark.
There are several reasons for that. The index covers only the 1,520 mm gauge space, from the Dostyk/Altynkol crossings to Brest, while much of the volatility in the through China–Europe rate is created outside that perimeter. Its largest single component—regulated rail tariffs—usually changes just once a year. And UTLC ERA calculates the index itself, with no independent check on the underlying data.
So turning ERAI into a tool for marketing the corridors and monitoring the market, the authors of the concept argue, will take more than a wider family of indices. It will also take an independent calculation methodology, transparent source data, and components that capture what a move actually costs the end customer.
Lyubov Rovba
Correspondent, Kazakhstan Temirzholshysy newspaper
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