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Emerging inter industry partnerships between shipping lines and stevedores from rivalry to cooperation Martin Sopp a Francesco Parolab Antoine Fr monta aINRETS SPLOT French National Institute for Transport and Safety Research 2 Avenue du Gl Malleret Joinville 94114 Arcueil Cedex France bUniversity of Genova Department of Business Studies CIELI Italian Centre of Excellence for Integrated Logistics Via Vivaldi 5 16126 Genova Italy a r t i c l ei n f o Keywords Shipping lines International terminal operators Ports Corporate strategy Co operation Maritime network a b s t r a c t Since late 1960s stevedoring operations assumed a dramatic importance for shipping lines who have been securing dedicated berths for some decades Over the last 20 years the institutional turn in ports drove the overseas expansion of pure stevedoring companies For quite a long time carriers and steve dores fi ercely battled each other both for bargaining contractual arrangements and for securing new con cessions in the key port areas Currently this scenario is slowly changing and some early forms of partnership are coming out This paper analyses the different pathways through which carriers satisfy their needs of handling services Based on 2006 data it empirically demonstrates the growing resort to such forms of cooperation both contractually and via equity ventures 2008 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved 1 The liner shipping industry and the supply of port services The advent of containerisation has deeply affected the organisa tion of maritime shipping industry as well as the relationships among the players within the transportation chain The demand for containerised transport has been continuously increasing and leading shippers to progressively enlarge their focus towards a global perspective The whole liner shipping industry had to adapt to these changes of demand Besides the expansion in marine oper ations top shipping lines SLs have also aimed at reducing other production costs diversifying their investments and achieving paths of vertical integration along the transportation chain Panay ides and Cullinane 2002 Major carriers have deeply invested on the land side set up a network of port facilities all over the world and become integrated shipping lines1 ISLs In reaction to the carriers evolving and aggressive strategies but also in order to exploit the growing investment opportunities offered by the recent institutional turn in ports De Monie 1994 Airriess 2001 Juhel 2001 World Bank 2001 some pure terminal operators PTOs have been expanding their operations internationally by setting up wide networks of terminal facilities across various regions The port handling sector has been experi encing a similar consolidation trend a handful of International Terminal Operators2 ITOs is on the point of dominating the market The emergence of powerful pure terminal operators PTOs willing to diversify their portfolios and to increase their fi nancial margins overseas gave momentum to carriers involvement in ter minals as major shipping lines were growingly constrained to de fend their enormous investment in maritime assets i e vessels The last few years have been characterised by a strong battle be tween carriers and PTOs to get the control of the port phase Nevertheless this scenario characterised by a clear cut separa tion and a fi erce competition between SLs and PTOs Parola and Musso 2007 is slowly changing i e corporate realignment Slack 2004 The progressive scarcity of available port spaces for greenfi eld projects the end of the privatisation window early 1990s early 2000s as well as the enormous cash fl ows needed for the realization of modern terminal facilities are leading PTOs and carriers to stay closer to each other and to experiment with some forms of co operation In other words the above changes are driving towards a partial convergence of their respective interests givingrisetotheestablishmentofcontractualandequity cooperative agreements 0966 6923 see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved doi 10 1016 j jtrangeo 2008 04 006 Corresponding author Tel 33 1 47 40 72 20 fax 33 1 45 47 56 06 E mail addresses martin soppe inrets fr M Sopp parola economia unige it F Parola antoine fremont inrets fr A Fr mont 1 Shipping lines which have taken on many roles in the supply chain involving more than just sea transport One of these activities is terminal operations which is of interest in this paper 2 In this respect a very common term used in the container handling business by leading consultants Drewry OSC etc is Global Terminal Operators GTOs Nevertheless in this paper we prefer to use the term ITO because as demonstrated by Parola and Veenstra 2008 only a few terminal operators show a real global terminal network Therefore it is more appropriate to discuss international players avoiding the potentially misleading GTO terminology although widely used ITOs as well as GTOs refers to both PTOs and ISLs as defi ned earlier Journal of Transport Geography 17 2009 10 20 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Transport Geography journal homepage 1 1 Literature review Within the academic literature the topic of container port ser vices has been considered by many studies The involvement of shipping lines in stevedoring activities and the emergence of ded icated terminals have been discussed earlier by Slack 1993 and Haralambides et al 2002 Stopford 2002 showed the impor tance of the cost of handling operations that justifi es their inter nalisation Sys 2005 and Cullinane and Khanna 2000 explored the productivity driven reasons related to the increasing size of vessels Other authors addressed the integration of terminal activ ities as a consequence of carriers networks extension and their hub and spoke organization Baird 2006 Guy 2003 Heaver et al 2000 Rimmer 2004 Analysed vertical integration strategies of carriers highlighting the potential role of network economies in such a process Intermodality is also among the leading factors pushing SLs to keep control on their terminal operations Notte boom 2004a Panayides 2002 Contrary to carriers entry in ports the emergence of PTOs has been caught up by the mainstream literature relatively late Early studies by Ferrari and Benacchio 2000 and Peters 2001 showed leading players expanding in various markets More recently Not teboom 2004b discussed major PTOs in relation to the growing concentration in liner shipping and to the rise of global alliances Midoro et al 2005 addressing the Peters typology on terminal operators waves of internationalisation focused on major drivers of carriers vertical strategies in ports Slack and Fr mont 2005 and Olivier et al 2007 analysed the stevedoring industry clearly outlining the two dominant business models PTO and ISL Finally Olivier 2005 approached the role of emerging local forms of partnerships between PTOs and ISLs and foresaw the future estab lishment of wider inter industry relationships even at a global scale While much attention remains focused on global carriers and PTOs as a customer supplier duo or as competing port investors no efforts have been made to evaluate the match between the de mand and the supply of handling services in really quantitative terms Moreover the current trends reshaping the port industry Olivier and Slack 2006 are also calling for a new understanding of it mostly based on terminals instead of ports as a whole as the new emerging elementary unit of analysis terminalisation of seaports Slack 2007 A terminal by terminal approach seems to be much more relevant to depict the existing correlations between the top players of two industries 1 2 Aim of the paper and research questions The purpose of our research is to investigate the nature of the relationships between carriers and terminal operators in ports This paper addresses two relevant research questions The fi rst one is to outline how carriers satisfy their growing need of port han dling services We identify the ocean carriers major handling providers and consider whether they are predominantly interna tional or local players We also evaluate the relevance of self han dling within the overall activity Our methodology which is quantitative and based on transport capacity reveals the depen dency of SLs on third party handling providers as well as the rela tionship between carriers maritime services and their own port network This discussion leads to a second and even more chal lenging question are carriers and stevedores really embracing a path of co operation in ports after having fi ercely battled for such a long time From a carrier s viewpoint this would mean to rely on the handling capacity of the same stevedore in many ports around the world thus projecting on an international scale a contractual relation previously managed only on a port by port basis More over this much closer relationship could easily drive to equity partnerships in specifi c port projects in which carriers are inter ested in joint investment for supporting their maritime network Our paper demonstrates the legitimacy of such an hypothesis showing the emerging forms contractual and equity of vertical coordination3between carriers and stevedores and highlighting players which are resorting to such partnerships The paper is structured as follows Section 2 is dedicated to methodological issues explaining the data used for our quantita tive analyses In Section 3 we address the evolution of the con tainer handling business characterised by the entry of carriers and the extension of PTOs networks and also the structure of the market comparing the demand and supply sides from a geograph ical viewpoint Our analyses reveal a gap in terms of geographical coverage and market maturity between carriers demand and PTOs supply which is one of the elements explaining the carriers strat egies vis vis handling activities at the global level Finally Sec tions 4 6 provide a deeper empirical study of the latter aiming at identifying unrevealed and geographically extended forms of inter industry co operation between SLs and ITOs 2 Methodological notes A quantitative analysis of carriers traffi c fl ow distribution over terminals is an interesting method of addressing the relationship between terminal operators and SLs The analysis of such fi gures can give a novel insight into the way SLs satisfy their growing needs of port services such as the share of self handling through WOS4and POS5 the diversifi cation of the suppliers portfolio the degree of dependence on major third party terminal operators especially PTOs or the relevance and the geographical spread of emerging cooperative ventures JVs between shipping lines and PTOs in ports For the purpose of this research carriers statistical data on traf fi c fl ows handled in each container terminal are probably the most relevant Unfortunately the latter are unavailable being consid ered as highly strategic and kept confi dential by SLs Nevertheless the extrapolation of data on transport capacities i e vessel slots makes it possible to overcome the unavailability of carrier s throughput per terminal Fr mont and Sopp 2004b showed a strong correlation 0 91 between the throughput and the trans port capacities of calling services per port For this study we calcu lated such coeffi cient of correlation for the 145 individual facilities operated by ITOs The resulting value 0 82 still shows a high de gree of correlation and demonstrates the fairness of our approach replacing real traffi c data not available by transport capacity In this relation we have collected information on maritime con tainerised services in 2006 year end from the Containerisation International on line data set We completed the work investigat ing the brand name of the different container terminal companies called at by each maritime service This latter information is a re sult of an intense and deep research into all available sources SLs and terminal operators websites corporate interviews Con tainerisation International on line Drewry reports professional press releases and scientifi c papers Such data on various terminal handling suppliers do not have a high confi dentiality value at the level of a single port but acquire a considerable value when col lected and aggregated on a regional or worldwide scale In this re spect accurate information on relevant shareholders has also been collected in order to weight their different fi nancial involvement in each project 3 Vertical coordination adjustment between the different phases of the transpor tation chain in this paper such a concept is applied to the relationships between shipping lines and terminal operators in ports 4 WOS wholly owned subsidiaries 5 POS partially owned subsidiaries M Sopp et al Journal of Transport Geography 17 2009 10 2011 Our quantitative analysis focuses on the distribution of trans port capacity for fourteen selected shipping lines Table 1 The sample covers exhaustively all the ports of call 14 top shipping lines ranked by fl eet capacity including their main subsidiaries the two major strategic alliances and the 27 current ITOs Table 2 both PTOs and ISLs ranked by throughput The stevedoring companies outside our sample have been labelled as local play ers Our sample covers all the shipping services directly operated by the selected carriers deploying owned and chartered vessels Feederconnectionshavebeenconsideredonlyifdirectly operated For all the services we examine the call capacity i e vessel size in TEUs in container terminals 2006 The data from Contain erisation International provide for each service the port rotation the number and the capacity of ships deployed by each carrier and the frequency The above parameters have been organised within the WCTC database Weekly Containerised Transport Capacity database which has the called port per each carrier s service as its elementary record In case of services jointly run by an alliance or a consortium the real contribution i e shared vessels of each SL has also been specifi ed For reasons of unifor mity and consistency all capacities have been converted to weekly equivalent terms called weekly capacity More specifi cally the relationship between the carrier demand and the terminal oper ator supply has been managed weighting the WCTC by the fi nan cial involvement of different terminal shareholders Thus the WCTC generated by a vessel call of any maritime service has been split among and associated to various shareholders as explained in the following example The weighted weekly containerised trans port capacity is referred to as WWCTC Let s consider a terminal d with the following shareholders A 50 B 40 C 10 Let s consider a maritime service X calling at d WCTCX d is the weekly capacity of the service X calling at d WWCTCX A is the weighted capacity of the service X calling at d assigned to the shareholder A The WCTC is split among the three shareholders A B C WCTCX d WWCTCX A WWCTC X B WWCTC X C WCTCX d 0 5WCTCX d 0 4WCTC X d 0 1WCTC X d 3 A geographical frame for vertical coordination demand versus supply offset The SLs strategies are determined by the supply of terminal facilities made available by the terminal operators Size market shares bargaining power prices portfolio of terminals and geo graphical reference determine the very context in which the verti cal coordination takes shape As transport activity is strongly location dependent we will fi rst examine the geographical match between the supply i e container terminal networks and the demand i e geographical distribution of transport capacities focusing in particular on the global scale Fig 1 reveals a considerable lag of the stevedoring industry on the pathway to globalisation This in fact is a relatively young industry contrarytolinershippingwhichisamaturesector Thislagcanbeex plainedbythedifferentglobalisationmechanismsaffectingcontainer handlingandlinershippingindustries aswellasmanufacturingsec tors Production sectors have been at the core of the globalisation process and have sought to exploit geographical differences econo mies of scale and the possibility of overcoming national constraints Table 1 Sampled leading shipping lines groups and strategic alliances Shipping Lines SL Country of origin Alliance or independent Fleet capacity TEU Vessels Maersk LineaDenmarkIndependent1 608 431518 MSCSwitzerlandIndependent942 205306 CMA CGMbFranceIndependent569 708220 EvergreencTaiwanIndependent539 801166 Hapag LloydGermanyGrand Alliance448 840138 CosconChinaCKYH Alliance385 368125 China ShippingChinaIndependent349 10598 APLSingaporeNew World Allianced 329 896102 Hanjin Shipping South KoreaCKYH Alliance322 48277 NYK LineJapanGrand Alliance273 77984 OOCLHong KongGrand Alliance268 50270 K LineJapanCKYH Alliance247 39680 Yang Ming LineTaiwanCKYH Alliance223 19280 MISCMalaysiaGrand Alliance43 61516 Source our elaborations from CI on line database as October 1st 2006 a Maersk includes Safmarine b CMA CGM includes Delmas c Evergreen includes Italia Marittima and Hatsu d The New World Alliance is not included in the sample as the paper is only focused on the two biggest alliances Table 2 Sampled international terminal operators Terminal operator TypeCountry of origin Throughput million TEU 2005 share No of ports mid 2006 Hutchison Port H PTOHong Kong51 813 044 APM TerminalsaISLcDenmark40 410 142 P Joint venture JV entering in a joint venture with local and or international partners equity share 6 50 Partially Owned Subsidiary POS establishing or acquiring a company acting as terminal operator equity share 50 Wholly Owned Subsidiary WOS establishing or acquiring a company acting as terminal operator equity share 100 Except for the fi rst option all the others usually drive the carrier to obtain dedicated or at least prioritised handling services for its calling vessels This points out how carriers differentiate their con sumption of port services either by adopting a se