Liner shipping cascading effect on Southern African Development Community port strategies

Abstract

Background: The cascading effect in the liner shipping industry has forced the ply of larger ships to Southern African Development Community (SADC) ports. This requires these ports to revise their strategic development to accommodate the resulting shifts in cargo flows to and from these strategic ports in conjunction with hinterland corridor development.Objectives: The purpose of this research was to understand the changing landscape of strategic SADC ports and develop future strategies with regard to liner shipping services.The main objective was to assess the future development needs of the SADC port system in relation to the cascading effect in liner shipping, linked to the development of hinterland corridors, identifying the limitations and opportunities of each port.Method: Descripto-exploratory research and analysis of secondary data were used. An extensive research of 552 sources (journal articles, research reports, books, newspaper and magazine articles and webpages) dating mostly from the year 2000 onwards were analysed.Results: Durban will remain the preferred container hub port for the foreseeable future if the port can increase its capacity and offer superior customer service in relation to competing ports in the region, such as Maputo, Walvis Bay and Ngqura. Durban is well adapted to accommodate the port and landside requirements resulting from the cascading effect. This is most evident in the depth of the port and port-side handling equipment. The findings confirm that the success of other SADC ports and corridors are subject to regional cooperation and integration without which the dominance of the port of Durban and the Maputo and North–South corridors will continue.Conclusion: The findings of the research indicate that Durban is ideally suited to develop further as a container hub port for the SADC region. This development is subject to a more competitive port landscape in the region as other ports such as Maputo, Walvis Bay and Ngqura improve their liner shipping service offering.

Strategic Management of Constanta Port

“…Taking into account the maritime opening of Romania, an optimal connection between production and consumption should be ensured by using the port infrastructure to its maximum capacity. The choice of the ports is made depending on the location, the possibilities of satisfying consumers' needs, attractive prices, connections with the rest of the ports, adequate infrastructure, combined with experience, creativity, professional training (Goolam Nabee & Walters, 2018).…”

“…From competition's point of view, according to UNCTAD (2009), the most remarkable ports are those in Asia, and at the opposite pole are those in Africa, given the inadequate infrastructure and the high number of ports relatively small in size (Goolam Nabee & Walters, 2018).…”

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Saved or starved? The importance of sediment management in determining the future response of estuaries and deltas.

“…Dredging deeper channels and ports to accommodate growing ships is not unique to the RMD. Indeed ports located in deltas and estuaries all over the world including in the USA (Carse and Lewis, 2020;Shepsis et al, 2001), South America (Guerrero et al, 2013), Asia (Wu et al, 2014;Wu et al, 2016b;Jarriel et al, 2020), Australia (Sampson et al, 2014), Africa (Nabee and Walters, 2018) and Europe (Grossmann, 2008;Van Maren et al, 2015;Gasparotti et al, 2016) are periodically or continuously removing sediment to compete with each other economically and to provide goods to growing populations. Recently, innovative solutions are being explored to try and combat this issue including under-keel clearance modelling (Mortensen et al, 2017), improvements to engines and engine efficiency (Merk et al, 2015) and an increased focus on adaptive port planning (Taneja et al, 2010).…”