In the paper ‘Container port competition in Europe’ published in February 2016 authors T Notteboom and P de Langen paint a multi-faceted and challenging picture of the port industry, explaining how wider economic factors impact the ability of ports to compete effectively.<\/p>\n
Highlighting the increasingly complex logistics of shipping in Europe, the authors point out that ports now compete not as individual places that handle ships but within transport chains or supply chains. If a seaport wants to attract or retain megacarriers, they argue, it has to position itself as an efficient intermodal hub and logistics service centre acting with extension transport and communications networks.<\/p>\n
European integration has created a single market in which disparate economic centres in east and central Europe, the Nordic triangle and the Iberian peninsula increasingly make their mark, thereby leading to new load centres and inland transport corridors.<\/p>\n
As a result, ports can no longer expect to attract cargo simply because they are natural gateways to rich hinterlands and seaports are having to compete fiercely to extend these frontiers.<\/p>\n
At the maritime side, new liner service network configurations and larger ships force ports into head-on-head competition. Trading between Europe and the far East has gradually overtaken the Atlantic to become the most important intercontinental trade and this change has seen ever larger vessels pushing ports to stretch their accessibility profile.<\/p>\n
The consolidation process in the container handling industry has also had an impact on individual ports. Large terminal operators are losing their ties to one particular seaport, whilst competition has shifted from port authorities to private terminal operators.<\/p>\n
In the present port competition model, ports are frequently pushed into making investment decisions of a very speculative nature with little guarantee that traffic will increase and shipping lines will retain their loyalty.<\/p>\n
The authors propose that a supply chain perspective is required when analysing port competition. Especially important, they argue, is the spatial distribution of supply chains as these have a huge impact on container volumes in ports. As a result, inland nodes with large volumes of distribution centres, for example Duisburg, Venlo and Meerhout, account for large container volumes.<\/p>\n
All these changes in the port environment have an impact on port hierarchy. Firstly, seaports located far away from each other are now to some extent competing. Secondly, the position of some large load centres is challenged by medium-sized ports and new hub terminals.<\/p>\n
Many carriers are using these new hubs to shift boxes between linehaul services in order to serve more markets with fewer vessels despite this strategy possibly leading to an unstable and fragile position.<\/p>\n
Competition between European container ports focuses mainly on their capacity to attract the maximum container volume in order to justify direct calls. Key factors to success include proximity to a strong cargo generating and receiving hinterland; a favourable location; a strong sea and land connectivity; a high port and terminal efficiency and the right pricing and supply chain approach.<\/p>\n
The authors conclude that the increasingly complex playing field has led to debates about the need to reform port governance structures, particularly away from the UK where ports are typically government-owned. They note that there is no longer a market in which all players can record growth \u2013 the gain of one port is increasingly the loss of another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Container port competition across Europe has become increasingly complex and intense, creating a market in which all players can no longer record growth, according to a recent academic study by Portecomonics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":9731,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-9730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9730"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9732,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9730\/revisions\/9732"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9730"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=9730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}