By Theo Notteboom
It is early days to estimate the ramifications of #covid-19 on ports. Still, past crises reveal interesting facts. The graph shows the impact of past crises on cargo concentration in the Hamburg-Le Havre port range in Europe.
The orange line gives the combined market share (basis=TEU) of the three largest ports in the range, Rotterdam, Antwerp & Hamburg. The blue line depicts the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for the range. HHI is a concentration measure: the higher the index the more cargo is concentrated in only a few large ports. An important finding: almost every time a crisis emerges, cargo concentration levels decrease. This suggests that larger ports are hit the hardest during a crisis, at least in terms of market share, given their high exposure to global shocks. This effect might somewhat be counterbalanced by carriers’ decisions to consolidate cargo in hubs in times of crisis. The Coronacrisis will likely generate a similar effect in the short to medium term. Blanked sailings on the east-west trade lanes have a strong impact on the TEU volume in hub ports.
In the longer term, the search for more resilient global supply chains might eventually result in increased re/nearshoring of production and a growing importance of intra-regional flows.
