Containers

August 21st, 2015
Containers

By Theo Notteboom Recently, Hamburg announced that container throughput in the Elbe port saw a decline of 6.8% in the first half of 2015 compared to the same period last year, mainly caused by a sharp decrease in the trade volumes with Russia and China. The container business is generally considered as a growth sector. Over the past decades, ports around the world have become used to welcoming traffic growth year after year. A decline in container traffic is considered as unusual. But how often have ports reported cargo losses over the...
July 30th, 2015
Containers

The capabilities and strategies required for obtaining a concession to operate a container terminal in a seaport is the theme of the study conducted by the three PortEconomics co-directors, Thanos Pallis, Theo Notteboom and Peter de Langen, and is now part of a new volume "Port Management", just published by Palgrave. The volume is edited by Prof Hercules Haralambides (Erasmus University and Port of Brindisi), and brings together a collection of seminal papers from Palgrave's journal, Maritime Economics and Logistics. It is a...
July 21st, 2015
Containers

By Theo Notteboom When container shipping lines design a weekly service between Asia and North Europe, they have to decide how many and which ports of call to include in the schedule. On the North European side, they typically ensure they serve the biggest port regions. Therefore, almost all liner services on the North Europe – Far East trade have ports of call in the Rhine-Scheldt Delta (Rotterdam, Antwerp, Zeebrugge), the north German multi-port gateway region (Hamburg, Bremerhaven, Wilhelmshaven) and the southeast coast of the UK...
July 13th, 2015
Containers

By Theo Notteboom Discussions on port development, planning and competitiveness often tend to revolve around container flows. Quite a few ports around the world have developed some kind of 'container fetish', implying they have developed a very strong focus on container throughput. But how dependent are ports on container traffic? The infographic shows the evolution in some of the main north-European container ports. Three dimensions are presented. The vertical axis shows the container dependency or the share of container throughput in the...
July 13th, 2015
Containers

By Theo Notteboom In last week's infographic, Theo Notteboom analysed the container dependency of major North-European ports. But how is the situation in southern Europe? How dependent are West-Mediterranean ports on container traffic? As before, there are three dimensions in the infographic. The vertical axis shows the container dependency or the share of container throughput in the total throughput of the port. The horizontal axis depicts the degree of containerization or the share of containerized cargo in the total general cargo...
June 18th, 2015
Containers

By Jean-Paul Rodrigue Container ports are reflective of the world's commercial geography particularly since they dominantly handle finished and intermediate goods. Commodities are becoming more prevalent, but still remain a niche market. The map below shows container volumes in 2012 for ports above half a million TEU. Surprisingly, there is no publicly available dataset covering the traffic of container ports around the world. Some regional or national trade groups publish figures, but this data is only for an area and tends to be...
June 11th, 2015
Containers

By Jean-Paul Rodrigue Maritime shipping, more than any other form of transportation, benefits from economies of scale since they have a direct impact on its operational costs. There has thus been a tendency to deploy larger ships, particularly in container shipping, to service high volume trade routes such as between Asia and Europe. PortEconomics member Jean-Paul Rodrigue comments: A common issue with the application of economies of scale is that the maritime shipping company is internalizing its benefits since they have a positive...
May 31st, 2015
Containers

By Theo Notteboom Only 25 years ago, the container port system in mainland China was still in its infancy stage. During that time, Hong Kong acted as the only container gateway to China and Taiwanese ports Kaohsiung and Keelung benefited from Taiwan's economic success story in international trade. In May 1980, the Chinese government established the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, the first special economic zone in China. By the late 1980s, mainland Chinese ports in the Pearl River Delta saw the first fruits of this opening up policy. Growth...
May 28th, 2015
Containers

Port users perceptions of their experience in a given port, do matter and port performance measurement needs to take this into account argue Thanos Pallis and George Vaggelas in their latest port study that was presented at the 5th International Symposium on Ship Operations, Management & Economics (SOME 2015) held in Athens, Greece, 28-29 May 2015. The port industry is experiencing an ongoing transformation due to changes in its internal and external envi-ronment. Nowadays the industry is characterized by fierce competition of...
May 11th, 2015
Containers

By Theo Notteboom One could think that the days for upstream ports are counted given a growing demand for a good nautical accessibility and a fast turnaround time for the ever larger container vessels. A closer look at Antwerp and Hamburg, two of the largest upstream container ports in the world, urges us to think again. In the past few decades the large upstream ports in the Hamburg-Le Havre range have gradually gained market share at the expense of large coastal ports. In the late 1970s, Antwerp on the river Scheldt and Hamburg on the...
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