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Mei-Ling Wu
I started my career at Maersk in Copenhagen in 2016 as a supply chain analyst. Maersk is a 120-year-old shipping company that moves 12 million containers a year, and when I joined, most of their operations still ran on spreadsheets, phone calls, and institutional knowledge stored in the heads of people who'd been doing this for 30 years. My job was to help digitize operations, which meant spending a lot of time on container ships and in port terminals understanding workflows that hadn't changed since the 1990s.
The thing about supply chains is that they're invisible until they break. COVID made them visible. Suddenly, everyone cared about container ships and port congestion and semiconductor lead times. But the media coverage was terrible: it treated the supply chain as a single thing rather than a system of systems, each with its own economics, constraints, and failure modes.
I left Maersk in 2020 and joined Flexport in San Francisco as an operations lead. Flexport was trying to do what Maersk couldn't: build a modern, software-first freight forwarding company. I ran operations for the trans-Pacific lane, which meant coordinating ocean freight, customs brokerage, trucking, and warehousing for about $400M in annual cargo value. It was the most operationally intense job I've ever had.
At Flexport, I saw both the promise and the limitations of software in logistics. Software can make information visible. It can automate documentation. It can optimize routing. What it can't do is make a port crane move faster, or add capacity to a rail line, or reduce the 14-day ocean transit time from Shenzhen to Long Beach. The physical constraints are real, and a lot of supply chain tech startups learn this the hard way.
I started writing about supply chain technology in 2023, after leaving Flexport. My first viral piece was about why "real-time supply chain visibility" is mostly marketing fiction. It resonated because everyone in the industry knew it was true but nobody was saying it publicly.
I'm based in Singapore now, which is the best place in the world to cover global logistics. I speak Mandarin, English, and enough Danish to order coffee. I collect vintage shipping maps and I think the container ship is the most underappreciated invention of the 20th century.
Experience
- Operations Lead, Flexport (Trans-Pacific)
- Supply Chain Analyst, Maersk
- MSc Supply Chain Management, Copenhagen Business School