Mid-May, the European Commission raided a number of blue-chip shipping lines, as part of a probe into suspected price fixing in the sector.<\/p>\n
Companies in the EC\u2019s sights include NOL, OOIL, Evergreen, Hanjin, Maersk, CMA CGM and Hamburg Sud, all of which are vehemently denying any such charge.<\/p>\n
The shipping line raids follow on from the classification society probe back in 2008, where Det Norske Veritas, Bureau Veritas, Lloyd\u2019s Register, and the sector\u2019s association, the International Association of Classification Societies (IACS), were investigated on suspicion of breaking EU antitrust rules.<\/p>\n
In both cases, the commission were looking for alleged \u201crestrictive business practices\u201d, or cartels to you and I.<\/p>\n
So where\u2019s the smoke? Well, presumably vessel sharing arrangements will have raised some EC eyebrows. Maersk has vessel-sharing agreements with CMA CGM and Mediterranean Shipping Co, which allow one carrier to buy space on competitors\u2019 ships to reduce costs. Maersk and CMA CGM are also both members of the Transpacific Stabilization Agreement, which have the noble aim of working to \u201cdevelop voluntary, non-binding guidelines for rates and charges\u201d. Other carriers have similar agreements in Europe.<\/p>\n
For ports, these raids should ring at least two alarm bells. Firstly, if lines are found to be in breach of European anti-trust regulations \u2013 and it\u2019s still a big if \u2013 then that could change the face of liner operating in Europe for good. Out with vessel sharing and any collaboration between carriers, in with \u2018every man for himself\u2019 mentality and a resultant destabilisation of rates. In this shaky recovery period, some lines will make it, some won\u2019t \u2013 will your port count the winners or losers as clients?<\/p>\n
Secondly, where should our industry draw the line when it comes to discussing business with competitors? Are Memorandums of Understandings on business practices allowed between European ports? What about regional port associations, would they pass the test? And while we think about that, should we ask if ESPO is safe?<\/p>\n
Perhaps, just to be sure, we should we stop conference attendance if there\u2019s an outside chance that we might run into a colleague in a rival European port.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that we advocate anti-competitive behaviour \u2013 far from it \u2013 but it would be useful to have some direction from the EC on their version of \u2018anti-competitive\u2019. The class society raids forced IACS to adopt non-discriminatory membership criteria and to open the trade body’s technical working groups to competitors. The shipping line raids could mark the end of vessel sharing agreements. Ask yourself what impact a similar raid might have on European port operations and prepare for the worst.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ports should be watching the latest round of European anti-trust raids with interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1748,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-viewpoint"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1749,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions\/1749"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1747"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}