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This paper considers a container liner shipping problem with speed optimisation (CLSP-SO) to minimise the total costs of the fleet, which includes operating costs, capital costs and voyage costs. A...

This work investigates a robust container vessel sequencing (RCVS) problem in a service route. As weekly demands vary dramatically and cannot be forecasted accurately, shipping companies need to de...

Port operators provide attractive port charges, and liner shipping companies make decisions on ship scheduling, in accordance with port charges. This paper proposes a liner ship scheduling problem ...

Different transportation modes interrelate in intermodal transportation. Previous researches on intermodal transportation mainly investigate policy, network design, cargo routing or drayage operati...

In recent years, the Northeast Passage (NEP) has been widely discussed in the shipping industries since it can potentially bring economic benefit thanks to its relatively short sailing distance vis...

Due to the outstanding strength of advanced machine-learning techniques, they have become increasingly common in predictive studies in recent years, particularly in predicting ship energy performan...

This paper extends and complements the liner shipping literature by examining the ship deployment decision in the presence of time windows at container ports. A set of tight bounds on the number of...

This paper aims to assess the policy gap in port selection of liner shipping companies. Based on the operational features of liner shipping and relevant literature, the port selection factors (PSFs...

This paper analyses the modal shift from a primary road-based to coastal shipping-based freight distribution. A mathematical model is developed to optimize the coastal shipping route planni...

This paper investigates the cyclical nature of container shipping market represented by a containerized freight index and proposes a predictive cyclical model of the market. In contrast to the traditional spectral analysis (univariate), system dynamics reflect the drivers of the market in both supply and demand side, and therefore, it is a multi-variate system equilibrium approach consisting of various causal spillovers from sub-components of the market. This study is the first to analyze the cycle of container market using system dynamics. By utilizing system dynamics cyclicality approach, one-step ahead predictions are generated for monthly containerized freight index and compared to conventional benchmarks for post-sample validation. Our study can also help policymakers and shipping liners for better management and invest timing of container ship.

This paper presents a new concept for a hub-and-spoke network structure, called “sub-hub”, applied to global operations of liner shipping. Hub-and-spoke networks are widely used in transportation d...

Accurately estimating fuel consumption of ships is crucial for shipping companies, port authorities, and environmental protection agencies. The bottom-up approach is becoming increasingly popular b...

Based on an analysis of 253 related papers drawn from the Web of Science database, this study examines holistic sustainability research in liner shipping management literature using a citat...

This paper integrates empty container reposition with container shipping network design considering the container life stages. A mixed-integer linear programming model is built to determine...

The relatively limited capacities of inland container liner shipping mean that, unlike in maritime container shipping, capacity utilisation is more important than scheduling. Capacity utilisation a...

The Mega-ships, the maximum containerships represented by 20,000TEU-class (LOA:400m, Breadth: 60m, Draft: 16m) which are able to transit both the Malacca Strait and the Suez Canal, have emerged in ...

Vessel speed optimisation has, in recent years, been recognised as a practical and important cost reduction strategy in the maritime shipping industry. This paper takes a new look at the trade-off ...

We provide two empirical models for calculating the sailing time and berth time of maritime container liner networks to effectively model the ambiguity associated with sea and port contingency for ...

The Belt and Road initiative is a novel exploration of China towards strategic collaboration with Eurasia countries to an extent of a larger scale with higher and deeper level of cooperation. To meet the growing global demand of transportation, increasing numbers of liner shipping companies collaborate and form alliances to share vessel capacity and reduce capital costs. Effective liner shipping vessel sharing is essential for the Belt and Road initiative in terms of building efficient maritime transport networks. In promoting environmental development, shipping companies are required to attain higher environmental standards. However, limited literature relates vessel sharing to environmental performance. This paper studies the impacts of liner vessel sharing from the economic and environmental perspectives. Two container allocation models are developed for the two scenarios: with and without vessel sharing. The carbon emissions in transportation are calculated under both scenarios. Numerical studies are carried out using services along the China-Indochina Peninsula Economic (CIPE) Corridor. Liner shipping companies could benefit from vessel sharing in terms of significant profit improvement. Vessel sharing could also benefit the environment by reducing the CO2 emissions dramatically.

A novel methodology is developed for determining the characteristics of a cargo roll-on/roll-off (ro-ro) ship and the fleet size required for a given short sea shipping route. The ship and required fleet size to satisfy the transportation demand (for each pair of speed and freight rate) are determined using a database of existing cargo ro-ro ships to obtain the main technical characteristics of the most suitable ship. The time charter, voyage costs and revenue are then calculated considering the technical characteristics of each ship. Fuel costs are corrected for the actual ship speed and loading condition. A number of restrictions in the transportation problem are considered leading to the exclusion of unfeasible solutions. The maximum profit over the period of a year is identified among the feasible pairs of speed and freight rate. This general methodology is applied in a case study that considers the route between Leixoes (Portugal) and Rotterdam (Netherlands). The study allows the identificati...

This paper focuses on the container rerouting due to a disruption, aims at making the optimal container flow recovery plan for the affected liner shipping company. First, we make the initial effort to bring up with a basic framework of disruption management for liner shipping. Second, we present a compact integer linear programming model for addressing the container rerouting problem under the proposed framework in a hub-and-spoke liner shipping network, based on a given recovery vessel schedule that determines to omit a port of call. Other shipping companies’ services and other modes (roadway, railway, and airline) as candidate alternative means to transport the miss-connected containers are also incorporated in the proposed model. The container flow recovery plan would select the optimal alternative paths for the miss-connected containers balancing the trade-off between container transport costs and delivery delay penalty costs. Finally, a case study from a global liner shipping company is inves...

In this paper, we empirically test the relationship between the delay of containerships and the scheduled operations in a terminal, based on a dataset containing information on 352 containership arrivals during a 9-month period at seven terminals of three North American ports. We find that a vessel is less likely to be delayed when there are more operations scheduled shortly (up to 3 days) after the vessel’s berthing window in the terminal. Moreover, we also find that the more containers a vessel needs to unload in the terminal, the less likely that it would be delayed. Both findings support the hypothesis that liners strategically balance the trade-off between delay cost and schedule recovery cost.

In this study, we establish a multi-stage data envelopment analysis model to evaluate the efficiency of global liner shipping companies (LSCs). Because conventional solution procedures cannot guarantee the uniqueness of solutions, in this study, we specifically devise a new two-phase algorithm to overcome this problem. The first phase ranks the priority of all stages by applying fuzzy analytical hierarchical process. The second phase then solves the efficiency score for each stage according to its priority. We established and empirically tested a three-stage research model based on data collected from the Containerization International Year Book, the Alphaliner website and annual LSC reports for the year 2012. The results show that the proposed algorithm not only determines unique solutions for the efficiency scores but also determines the priority order of the stages involved in this process. Taking advantage of the proposed model and algorithm, LSCs can effectively locate bottlenecks in their pr...

In maritime freight transportation, carriers build collaborative relationships with other carriers while competing with each other to optimize their own profits. In such a scenario, a game of coopetition is formed. We formulate a nonlinear mixed-integer problem to determine the optimal levels of coopetition for a single company and embed the resulting problem into a general game theoretic framework. A diagonalization algorithm that incorporates an ascent direction search technique is developed to effectively evaluate the game. The numerical results show that carriers choose similar coopetition levels to maximize their profits, and the coopetition game can reach equilibrium under general conditions.

This study examines how to incorporate the inventory costs of containerized cargoes into existing liner service planning models such that the designed networks could be improved while not causing extra modeling/computational burden. Two approaches are compared: (i) not considering the inventory costs at all and (ii) incorporating the inventory costs associated with onboard time and those related to transshipment by assuming a fixed connection time. The two models are compared with the ideal model capturing the exact inventory costs on a route choice problem and a capacity planning problem based on extensive randomly generated and practical numerical experiments. The results show that: first, ignoring the inventory costs in service planning models may lead to network design with much higher costs (poor network design decisions); second, in service planning models assuming weekly frequency, the inventory costs associated with onboard time could be formulated exactly, and those related to the connect...

This paper develops a theoretical model to analyze the congestion internalization of the shipping lines, taking into account the “knock on” effect (i.e. the congestion delay passed on from one port-of-call to the next port-of-call). We find that with the presence of the knock-on effect, liners will operate less in terminals, and an increase of a liner’s operation in one terminal will decrease its operation in the other. If the liners are involved in a Stackelberg competition, whether they operate more or less in a terminal under the knock-on effect depends on the comparison between the marginal congestion costs of terminals. Furthermore, we find that the coordinated profit-maximizing terminal charges are higher than both the socially optimal terminal charges and the independent profit-maximizing terminal charges. When the knock-on effect is small, the independent profit-maximizing terminal charges are set at higher levels than the socially optimal terminal charges; but when the knock-on effect is sufficiently large, this relationship may reverse. Finally, the capacity investment rules are the same for welfare-maximizing terminal operator and coordinated profit-maximizing terminal operator, while independent profit-maximizing terminal operators invest less in capacity. The larger the knock-on effect, the larger this discrepancy.

Maritime transportation is one of the most capital-intensive industries. Fleet planning is vital but challenging to shipowners because the industry is extremely volatile. Relatively few papers have studied strategic fleet planning in tramp shipping, which is intertwined with contract analysis and different from that in industrial or liner shipping. This article develops a mixed-integer programming model, and it is the first of its kind that jointly optimizes strategic fleet planning and the selections of long-term and spot contracts in tramp shipping. The model can be used to determine the best mix of long-term and spot contracts for a given fleet and/or to find the optimal fleet size and mix for a set of contracts. It can be used as a basis for a fleet renewal programme, informing decisions on when to sell, whether to buy old or new ships, and when to charter in or out vessels. A numerical example is given to illustrate how to use the model to evaluate different operations strategies.

This paper presents an application of centralized data envelopment analysis (CDEA) to analyse the performance of a number of container terminals supervised by one liner shipping company. It provides a systematic and centralized perspective of resource reallocation based on one company’s perspective. The numerical results show that two of the five dedicated terminals are, by and large, efficient, but the other three need resources to be reallocated. Under the minor adjustment scenario, the liner shipping company should reduce the aggregated amount of the labour cost and the hauling equipment should be transferred to different terminals in America. Under the major adjustment scenario, both the labour and hauling equipment could be reduced.

The topic of supplier evaluation and selection has been discussed for several decades in various industries but is rarely researched in maritime supply chain management. To maintain a ship’s seaworthiness, shipowners must expend money and provide all supplies that are required for repairs and consumption on board, including parts, stores, bunkers and lubricators. These expenditures can amount to over tens of thousands of dollars; thereby, an efficient and effective supply chain system for the provision of supplies is a top priority for shipowners. The evaluation and selection of suppliers is critical to the success of this system. This study aims to establish an appropriate and common approach for maritime supplier evaluation and selection. Because decision-makers in shipping companies typically confront an uncertain environment, we adopt a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (FMCDM) approach to analyse the behaviour of decision-makers and obtain the best maritime supplier. Meanwhile, via a survey for Ta...

The liner shipping industry has long been characterized by a weekly sailing frequency and schedule unreliability. This research is motivated by the launch of the revolutionary “Daily Maersk” service in late 2011, which introduced daily departures and “absolute reliability” in the Asia–North Europe trade lane. This paper analyzes Daily Maersk’s impacts on a shipper's supply chain inventories and profound implications for the liner shipping industry as a game changer. The quantitative analyses show that the impact of more frequent sailings is most significant on a shipper’s cycle stock, while improving schedule reliability substantially reduces safety stock and pipeline stock. Daily Maersk is most valuable for products that have high value density, high inventory holding cost ratio, low demand variability and high service level requirement. These findings imply that the trend of liner alliance/merger/acquisition is likely to continue or even accelerate as shipping lines consolidate fleet capacity to offer more frequent sailings. Rival carriers may step up their involvement in terminal operations to improve schedule reliability. They also need to rethink about their service level targets and clearly define their preferred customer segments. Accepted version

The merchant steamship market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dominated by the UK shipbuilding industry but past studies have portrayed a market characterized by the strong relationships between UK shipbuilders and shipowners where competition between firms was the exception rather than the rule. The objective of this article is to shed new light on this market by drawing on UK shipbuilding and shipping records to examine four characteristics that indicate the intensity of competition for new orders from 18891914: customer concentration, firms' business strategies, sales activities and price negotiation. Overall a market is revealed with many examples of shipbuilders deploying a high level of sales and marketing expertise which contributed both to the success of individual firms and to the UK shipbuilding industry as a whole.11I am grateful for the comments of the anonymous referee which helped me sharpen the emphasis of this paper.

This study analyzes capacity expansion and ship choice decisions. Theoretically, we derive the probability of capacity expansion as a function of market and company attributes and characterize the impacts of these factors on expansion decisions. Empirically, we analyze ship investment and ship choice behaviour using binary choice and nested logit models based on ship investment data from major liner shipping companies over the period 1999 to 2009. Most expansion decisions are found to be market-driven, and large companies expand to maintain their market shares. In terms of ship selection, statistical results support the assumption that shipping companies decide on a new order or second-hand purchase before considering the ship size. Also, new orders are preferable to second-hand purchases. For new orders, the preference increases with ship size, and decreases with shipbuilding length and demand growth rate. For all ship types, the preference increases with a high and stable time-charter rate. For second-h...

From 2000s, there have been three forces provoking slow steaming practice in the liner industry: (1) oversupply of shipping capacity, (2) increase of bunker price and (3) environmental pressure. This paper analyses the background and the recent application of slow steaming in liner shipping. The research looks into the questions of how slow steaming can save bunker consumption and bring benefits to the environment. On the other hand, solutions are also examined to the adverse side of slow steaming practice, i.e., how it affects the container transit time. For which, a cost model is developed to demonstrate the impact of slow steaming on the revenue change, with application to the North Europe—Far East Trade as a case study. The final result shows that the optimal speed for the shipowner is correlated with the designed speed, bunker price and the price of CO2. With the increase of the bunker price and the price of CO2, the optimal speed will also increase, which means that slow steaming practice has a posi...

The environment issue is one of the significant challenges that the liner shipping industry has to face. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has set a goal to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from existing vessels by 20–50% by 2050 and develop the Energy Efficiency Operational Indicator (EEOI) as a measure for energy efficiency. To achieve this goal, IMO has suggested three basic approaches: the enlargement of vessel size, the reduction of voyage speed, and the application of new technologies. In recent times, liners have adopted slow steaming and decelerated the voyage speed to 15–18 knots on major routes. This is because slow steaming is helpful in reducing operating costs and GHG emissions. However, it also creates negative effects that influence the operating costs and the amount of GHG emissions at the same time.This study started with the basic question: Is it true that as voyage speed reduces, the operating costs and CO2 emissions can be reduced at the same time? If this is true, lin...

After more than a decade of continuous growth of the container segment at the Panama Canal, the situation has changed mainly due to the effects of the Great Recession in U.S. Canal research indicated that the drop in the number of liner services through the waterway was mainly due to segment consolidation and subsequent service rationalization as well as the reduction in cargo volumes geared to the USA. All these changes made it extremely important to analyse the relative competitiveness of the Panama Canal route in comparison with all competing routes. A Panama Canal Route Competitive Analysis Model was developed to assess the competitiveness of maritime routes that use the Panama Canal against alternative routes based on total transportation expenses. Maritime transportation costs are derived from alternative route itineraries applied against different vessel types and vessel size. Inland transportation costs are obtained from market rates for three different modes of transportation: rail, truck and bar...

As part of the discussions of the environmental effects of the expansion of the Canal through the construction of a third set of locks, the Panama Canal Authority (PCA) began to consider measuring the impact of the project on global CO2 emissions in 2006. The hypothesis PCA intends to investigate whether the third set of locks will prompt reductions in total world CO2 emissions or not. The Canal's third set of locks will prevent reaching the saturation point, and will avoid diversion of traffic to potentially longer alternative routes, such as the Suez Canal and Cape Horn, thereby reducing distances and fuel consumption. In addition, the widening of the Canal may promote the construction of modern-type post-Panamax vessels, making transportation of freight more efficient through economies of scale. This white paper will initiate an exploratory research on the subject based on two possible scenarios: an existing Canal and an expanded Canal. Both scenarios will take physical distances, closest alternative r...

Increasing the number of vessels in a container liner service while reducing speeds, known as slow steaming strategy, has been a short-term response since 2008 to the challenges of over-capacity and the rise in bunker prices faced by shipping lines. This strategy, which reduces the fuel cost per voyage but increases the operating costs as more vessels are added to the service, is difficult to sustain when the transit time significantly affects the transportation demand. This article proposes a model applied to this situation, referred to as a case of optimal speed under semi-elastic demand, for which containerised perishable product transport is sensitive to time, while frozen and dry products are not. It investigates if slow steaming is still optimal when working to maximise the total profit on the cycle. In order to demonstrate the proposed model, a numerical application is carried out for a direct Northern Europe to East Coast of South America container service, a route selected due to the high volume ...

This paper proposes an integrated set of 4Cs indices, namely, centrality index, competition index, congestion index and concentration index to examine network effects in the East Asia container port industry. Empirical analysis confirms that larger ports enjoy greater direct network effects related to economies of scale, whereas, smaller ports leverage on indirect network effects to widen their scopes of influence to attract vessel calls. Ports tend to engage in more competitive interactions with their counterparts within the same region, even though cooperative relationships among ports across regions are beneficial. In the light of the empirical results, the paper proceeds to explain some important managerial and policy implications.

Recent publications on the design of liner shipping networks are limited in their treatment of the level of service (LoS) experienced by shippers. We propose the use of inventory holding costs—a function of merchandise transit time—as a proxy for LoS. We assume the existence of a two-tier optimization model, where fleet deployment, vessel routing, and vessel speed are determined in the higher tier. Merchandise flows and transshipment quantities are determined in the lower tier. We partition the total merchandise transit time into time spent in open waters, time spent during port calls, and time spent dwelling in the terminal yard. Using the notions of service frequency and service phase, we develop mathematical expressions for the three aforementioned quantities within the lower tier of the optimization model. We arrive at a bilinear expression for overall inventory holding costs that is suitable for liner shipping network design.

This paper aims to develop the construct of freight transport flexibility. Specifically, it explores the notion of freight transport flexibility from the perspective of the major liner operators in the container shipping industry. The research is designed around a structured methodology to system enquiry, namely the ‘understand, document, simplify, optimise’ (UDSO) approach. Within this, the method deployed to examine the freight transport flexibility construct is through the conduct of a series of semi-structured interviews with senior directors of three leading global container liner shipping companies, combined with an analysis of authoritative data sourced from across the industry. The study builds on the literature that categorises flexibility strategies in freight transport and examines, from the providers’ perspective, supply side flexibility capabilities that may be strategically deployed to maintain the stability of the maritime component in the international supply chain. For practitioners, the revised theoretical typology provides a tool that can be used by management in the container liner shipping sector to strategically examine their approach to flexibility tactics to restore equilibrium to the major imbalance in demand for container movement and the supply of vessel carrying capacity.

This paper is concerned with the cargo allocation problem considering empty repositioning of containers for a liner shipping company. The aim is to maximize the profit of transported cargo in a network, subject to the cost and availability of empty containers. The formulation is a multi-commodity flow problem with additional inter-balancing constraints to control repositioning of empty containers. In a study of the cost efficiency of the global container-shipping network, Song et al. (2005) estimate that empty repositioning cost constitutes 27% of the total world fleet running cost. An arc-flow formulation is decomposed using the Dantzig–Wolfe principle to a path-flow formulation. A linear relaxation is solved with a delayed column generation algorithm. A feasible integer solution is found by rounding the fractional solution and adjusting flow balance constraints with leased containers. Computational results are reported for seven instances based on real-life shipping networks. Solving the relaxe...

How do firms in the liner shipping industry choose between partnerships and acquisitions? In this longitudinal empirical study, we examine dyadic partnerships and acquisitions that took place in the liner shipping industry from 1994 to 2006. We identify and test specific factors that influence liner shipping firms in their strategic choice between partnerships and acquisitions. Using Cox regressions for our analyses, we find that two factors, the extent of redundant resources and the intensity of competition, increase the likelihood of the choice of acquisition, while a third factor, the nature of resources, affects the likelihood of acquisition in an inverted-U shaped (∩) manner. In addition, the home region of a firm and prior acquisition experience increases the probability of acquisitions while prior partnership experience decreases it. The level of synergy and degree of market uncertainty do not affect the mode of alliance choice. We discuss the implications of our findings for the “partner versus ac...

This paper investigates the impacts of maritime piracy on global economic development. Calibrated with data between 2003 and 2008, we model shipping demands and competition in the Far East-Europe container liner shipping service and investigate the economic welfare loss effects due to reduced volumes of trade and shipping, as well as efficiency loss due to geographical re-routing of shipping networks which would be otherwise uneconomical. The substantial economic loss simulated from our model indicates that, even from purely the perspective of economic interests, more efforts from the international community should be dedicated to tackle maritime piracy.

The fleet deployment problem is an important planning problem in liner shipping. It deals with optimally assigning voyages to available vessels in the fleet and determining vessel routes and schedules in a way that minimizes costs or maximizes profit. This paper presents a new model for a fleet deployment problem in liner shipping, and we also propose a multi-start local search heuristic to solve the problem. The heuristic has been embedded in a prototype decision support system (DSS) that has been implemented and tested at Hoegh Autoliners, a major global provider of ro-ro (roll-on roll-off) vehicle transportation services. The heuristic was able to produce high-quality solutions within a few minutes to a real planning problem with more than 55 vessels and 150 voyages over a planning horizon of 4–6 months. Tests indicated that the solutions suggested by the DSS gave between 2 and 10% improvements compared with solutions from manual planning. What is almost equally important is that using the DSS can ease...

A liner shipping network is a form of collaboration in the liner shipping industry where players such as intermodal services providers, container management services providers and container terminal operators share resources and assets to develop mutually beneficial strategies and seek operational performance gains. This paper examines the liner shipping industry from the network perspective with a focus on developing a descriptive framework for the development and operations of liner shipping networks. To achieve this objective, we use case study research to establish a descriptive framework for the reference of liner shipping companies (LSCs) and their business partners to operate and manage their networks competently. To understand the participation of LSCs in liner shipping networks, we explore the driving forces that prompt LSCs to develop and operate their networks based on evidence from case studies of liner shipping services. This study provides a useful framework for LSCs and their busin...

This study examines the global population of container liners and their trade route entry patterns from 1996 to 2006. Concepts from population ecology (population density, forces of legitimacy, competition and imitation, and the liability of smallness) are applied to empirically test the probability of entry by liners into a particular trade route. The findings show that entry into trade routes follows an inverted-U shaped (∩) relationship with the number of players operating in the trade route, increases with the number of trade routes operated by a player, and has a sharper inverted-U shaped relationship for Asian and North American firms. These findings, from the first comprehensive population level study of the liner shipping industry, provide insights into the strategic decision of entry into trade routes made by liner shipping firms during an 11-year period.

Deploying containerships with increasing carrying capacities in achieving better capacity utilization has been well-documented. However, ship operators often face the problem in deploying containerships with the right size, especially given the capital-intensive nature of container liner shipping, which would lead to substantial implications if inappropriate ships were used. While studies on optimal ship size exist, focus has mainly been on ship operation cost while its implications on other components, or whether there are adequate demands to load the ship, are often not considered. Moreover, while many studies focus on trunk routes, feeder services, despite its parallel significance in a hub-and-spoke shipping network, are often overlooked. Understanding such deficiency, using intra-Southeast Asian feeder liner services as the case study, this paper has undertaken an investigation in simulating the optimal containership sizes from the perspective of ship operators. Through questionnaire survey and econo...

Since 1990s the liner shipping industry has faced a period of restructuring and consolidation, and been confronted with a continuing increase in container vessel scale. The impact of these changes is noticeable in trade patterns, cargo handling methods and shipping routes, in short 'operations'. After listing factors influencing size, growth in container ship size is explained by economies of scale in deploying larger vessels. In order to quantify economies of scale, this paper uses the liner service cash flow model. A novelty in the model is the inclusion of +6000-20-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) vessels and the distinction in costs between single and twin propeller units on ships. The results illustrate that scale economies have been - and will continue to be - the driving force behind the deployment of larger container vessels. The paper then assesses the link between ship size and operations, given current discussions about the increase in container vessel scale. It is found that (a) ship size and operations are linked; (b) optimal ship size depends on transport segment (deep-sea vs. short-sea shipping, SSS), terminal type (transhipment terminals vs. other terminals), trade lane (East-West vs. North-South trades) and hnology; and (c) a ship optimal for one trade can be suboptimal for another.

This paper deals with the measurement of the network complexity of some selected shipping groups, also identifying the contribution of co-operative agreements among carriers. The empirical investigation is focused on: (i) the analysis of the distribution of the carrying capacity per range; and (ii) the comparison of that capacity with the throughput handled in the port facilities of the group. These variables are interpreted in the light of the impact that alliances have on the geographical wideness of the services supplied by each partner. This factor also allows to depict how the cultural and political origin of shipping lines affects the decision of joining an alliance and the outcomes deriving from such co-operation.

Market concentration on the major container shipping routes has the potential to reduce contestability, impede effective competition and, as a consequence, inhibit the positive relationship between trade and economic growth. This development could also hamper the ability of economic regions to realize their respective competitive and comparative advantages. Within this context, the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) framework is used to analyse liner shipping dynamics in the transpacific, Europe–Far East and transatlantic trade routes. The analysis finds no conclusive evidence that either the increased concentration of slot capacity or the attempts by shipping lines to boost potential slot capacity (mainly through collaborative arrangements) lead to improved financial performance. The paper concludes that, despite high and increasing concentration among carriers on each of the trade routes analysed, these markets remain contestable.