A.P. Moller – Maersk and IBM have announced their decision to abandon their blockchain-based global trade platform known as TradeLens after it failed to generate enough users.
Maersk launched TradeLens in collaboration with IBM in 2018 to promote efficient and secure global trade by helping to manage and track the millions of shipping containers trading globally by digitizing manual and paper-based systems across the supply chain. By nature, the platform’s success is heavily dependent on widespread industry participation.
Although the platform has steadily added companies, port authorities, and other entities to its user base, the platform has apparently failed to reach the critical mass needed to make it viable.
“TradeLens was founded on the bold vision to make a leap in global supply chain digitization as an open and neutral industry platform,” said Rotem Hershko, Head of Business Platforms at A.P. Moller – Maersk. “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.”
Starting this week, the TradeLens team will be taking action to discontinue the platform, with the intention to go offline by the end of the first quarter of 2023.
Maersk says it will continue its efforts to digitize the supply chain and increase industry innovation through other solutions to reduce trade friction and promote more global trade.
We are deeply grateful for the relentless efforts of our committed industry members and many tech talents, who together have worked diligently to advance the digitalization of the industry through the TradeLens platform. We will leverage the work of TradeLens as a steppingstone to further push our digitization agenda and look forward to harnessing the energy and ability of our technology talent in new ways,” added Hershko.
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