Liner alliances in the globalization era: a strategic tool for Asian container carriers

Abstract

There has been an increased interest recently in alliances as successors of the large consortia that used to operate in the context of the conference system. Today, having become a common means and term of co-operation in a variety of other industries, alliances are posited as the response of the supply side of liner shipping to important changes on the demand side; alliances have, thus, become predominant in the most important routes for container cargoes. In recent years, however, the list of major container tra c generators and the list of major carriers of containerized cargoes have begun to contain more common entries, generally originating from the Asian region. Asia is, however, a large continent and the entrance of Asian carriers into liner shipping has not been simultaneous; the position, strategies and co-operation strategies of Asian companies have more di erences than they share common features. Nevertheless, this paper suggests that alliances are a distinct form of co-operation in liner shipping and the empirical evidence based on a survey in the region supports this hypothesis. The similarity of attitudes of the major Asian container carriers vis a Á vis alliances is in this way revealing in terms of the range of motivations for participating in the alliance system in a globalized transport environment.

Competitive Advantage in Liner Shipping: A Review and Research Agenda

“…This has prompted the scientific examination of the strategic alliance concept (eg Evangelista and Morvillo, 1999 andMidoro and Pitto, 2000;Panayides and Song, 2001;Song and Panayides, 2002;Ryoo and Thanopoulou, 1999).…”

Measuring the scope of inter-firm agreements in the container shipping industry: an empirical assessment

“…Consortia were introduced in the 1960s with the aim to reduce costs due to the introduction of new typologies of vessels. In the 1990s strategic alliances had the goal to share risk and widen carriers' markets in order to develop economies of scope (Brooks et al, 1993;Ryoo and Thanopoulou, 1999;Alix et al, 1999;Midoro and Pitto, 2000) and sometimes to test if there were sufficient economic conditions for a subsequent merger (Das, 2011). Moreover, 'coopetitive' behaviours are observed when business involves a networked industry among firms, as maritime transport definitively is.…”

“…A number of scholars have already studied cooperation in liner shipping, mostly proposing qualitative studies (Ryoo and Thanopoulou, 1999;Brooks, 2000;Slack et al, 2002;Cariou, 2008). A few contributions (Ferrari et al, 2008;Panayides and Wiedmer, 2011) grounded on a strong empirical base have attempting to illustrate the dynamics in the container industry and provide findings on the collaborative schemes used.…”

Liner Shipping Fleet Deployment with Sustainable Collaborative Transportation

“…Zhou et al proposed two collaboration modes and used a simulation methodology to obtain the optimal dispatching plan for shippers [51]. In addition, although several papers mentioned the conception of liner alliances [52][53][54][55], few studies proposed how to proceed with the shipping collaborative transportation [56][57][58][59][60]. Although Agarwal and Ergun designed a shipping service and provided the collaborative mechanism, the model is hard to practically apply due to its complexity.…”