For SECH, the partnership perhaps fills a development void and may bring to it a new direction. SECH had in the recent past formulated plans to expand in conjunction with new needs expressed by the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) but with the ongoing development of La Spezia just down the road that need hasn’t materialised. MSC continues to look comfortable in La Spezia and hence SECH has an incentive to identify a different development path.

This idea of share swaps or even one competing party buying into another’s business is one that in the future may have increasing merit. At a systems level it perhaps represents a path via which there is more flexibility to service different – and invariably nowadays larger – ship types with a better overall use of resources.

At a commercial level, it is potentially a path through which the base of a business can be diversified and in certain circumstances stability added. Stability would particularly come, for instance, if an independent terminal operator were to swap equity stakes in terminals with a shipping line that had a terminal network. This would on the one hand secure business for the independent terminal operator in his existing network and on the other give him access to other terminal assets with a guaranteed throughput on which he could build by applying his particular skill set.

To some extent of course this “putting a foot in each other's camp” has been underway among independent terminal operators for some time, as highlighted by the Port of Singapore’s decision to buy a major stake in Hutchison. The idea of share swaps, however, is something of a new departure and perhaps we see in what is happening in Genoa the seeds of an interesting trend that promises to gain in influence.

Doubtless of course from various lips such a trend would prompt the word “monopoly” and fears of all the negatives that this brings. The challenge though is to try and see beyond this and the interesting solution that such a strategy represents to solving growing problems such as congestion. If there are major benefits then safeguards can be put in place to limit any downside; in a concession agreement for instance.

The container terminal sector continues to evolve – in the ‘80s, ‘90s and early part of this millennium there was considerable emphasis on technicalities, automation and so on, as a path to increased efficiency and profitability. It is, however, in the business arena and the application of creative thinking that the greatest potential for progress lies in the next decade. Equity swaps could well prove to be an interesting new dimension of this.