By Theo Notteboom
Since 2014, the container shipping industry is witnessing a massive wave of carrier consolidation. In mid-2014, Hamburg Süd acquired CCNI (Compañía Chilena de Navegación Interoceánica). In December 2014, the merger between Hapag-Lloyd and CSAV (Companía Sud Americana de Vapores) was completed. In late...
By Theo Notteboom
The Straits of Gibraltar is one of the most strategic points on East-West maritime trade lanes. Ports in the wider region around the Straits have good reasons to convince shipping lines of making a call at their container terminal facilities for transhipment and interlining purposes. The container volumes in the...
The movement of cargo in containers in Latin American and Caribbean ports grew 1.7% during 2015, according to figures unveiled in ECLAC’s new edition of its ranking of container port throughput, published in its Maritime Profile. These figures confirm two trends observed during the last years in the region: the slowdown of foreign...
By Theo Notteboom
The portgraphic shows the top 15 container ports in the European Union in 2015 based on container throughput expressed in TEU. It also includes container growth figures compared to 2014 and pre-crisis year 2007. What can we observe?
1. The total volume of the top 15 ports saw a small traffic decline of...
In 2011, the time span of the appearance of vessels averaging 13,000 TEU in South America was projected to be between 2016 and 2020 .
The great news was that on December 18, 2015, TCBuen, the Colombian terminal belonging to the Port of Buenaventura, received the largest container vessel ever to have operated in South America: the...
PortEconomics is celebrating the ending of 2015 recapping the articles that have captured the interest of the visitors of our web initiative so far for 2015.
As measured by Google Analytics the list of the top-5 papers on container ports:
1. Scenarios on alliance formation in container shipping
Having demonstrated how strategic...
By Theo Notteboom
With a total maritime container throughput of an estimated 101.5 million TEU in 2014, the European container port system crossed the 100 million TEU mark for the first time ever. Growth was particularly strong in the period 2005- 2007, with an average annual growth rate of 10.5%, compared to 6.8% in the...
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...
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...
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...
