The companies say they have signed 92 organisations for their cross-border supply chain programme to manage and track the tens of millions of shipping containers across the world.

TradeLens aims to create a global trade digitisation platform built on the Hyperledger Fabric and designed for use by the shipping industry.

More than 20 port and terminal operators, including PSA Singapore and the Port of Rotterdam, have signed up.

Container carrier Pacific International Lines has joined carriers Maersk and Hamburg Süd.

Several custom authorities – including in Saudi Arabia and Australia – are also signed up.

The partners say the digitised process is designed to help reduce fraud and errors, reduce the time products spend in the transit and shipping process, improve inventory management and ultimately reduce waste and cost.

More than 154 million shipping events have been captured on the platform, including data such as arrival times of vessels and container “gate-in”, and documents such as customs releases, commercial invoices and bills of lading.

This data is growing at a rate of close to one million events per day.