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Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the international shipping market has been highly volatile, posing a serious threat to the survival and development of many maritime start-ups. With the development of the digital economy, digital transformation is affecting the evolution and upgrading of many traditional enterprises, including maritime enterprises. In the post-COVID-19 era, start-up small and medium-sized enterprises will need to consider the importance of enterprise risk management to achieve transformation and upgrading. The purpose of this study is to provide guidance for the establishment and upgrading of risk management systems for start-ups based on the identification of risk management strategies of maritime enterprises and the evaluation of their performance. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and importance-performance analysis methods were used to rank the operational risk, financial risk, market risk, innovation risk, and disaster risk according to sub-items and screen out the risk management schemes for priority improvements. Through empirical research, it was found that the financial risk and market risk response schemes have the lowest performance and need to be prioritised for improvement. This study argues that start-ups can appropriately challenge their risk management strategies to meet potential risk management needs based on their own circumstances.
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Container ports operate in more challenging and volatile environments at present times. Events such as US-China trade tensions and the COVID-19 pandemic severely affect numerous container ports at various levels. Strategies pursued by container ports are key to port development and management amidst these challenges. Drawing on configuration theory, this research employs Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to investigate the relation between port strategies and container throughput. The research contributes to the literature by proposing an approach to account for complexity of the port sector and offers insights into strategies adopted by major container ports. The research further identifies 10 port strategies and proposed indicators that can represent the essence of these strategies. Being able to represent strategies in a quantitative format is important for strategy analysis and performance evaluation. Results reveal that major container ports employ a combination of strategies which address both the supply and demand-side aspects of the port business. Growing digitalization and digitization coupled with advancements in information capture, diagnostics capabilities and predictive abilities means a greater role for data analytics to influence container port strategy and performance. Implications for port managers, policy makers and researchers from the perspective of port policy and management are proposed.
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PurposeThis paper presents a systematic review of the literature in the domain of maritime disruption management, upon which future research framework and agenda are proposed. Two review questions, i.e. the measures that are employed to manage disruptions and how these contribute to resilience performance, were pursued.Design/methodology/approachThe systematic literature review procedure was strictly followed, including identification and planning, execution, selection and synthesis and analysis. A review protocol was developed, including scope, databases and criteria guiding the review. Following this, 47 articles were eventually extracted for the systematic review to identify themes for not only addressing the review questions but also highlighting future research opportunities.FindingsIt was found that earlier studies mainly focused on measures, which are designed using mathematical models, management frameworks and other technical support systems, to analyse and evaluate risks, and their impacts on maritime players at the levels of organisation, transport system and region in which the organisation is embedded. There is, however, a lack of research that empirically examines how these measures would contribute to enhancing the resilience performance of maritime firms and their organisational performance as a whole. Subsequently, a Digitally Embedded and Technically Support Maritime Disruption Management (DEST-MDM) model is proposed.Research limitations/implicationsThis review is constrained by studies recorded by the Web of Science only. Nevertheless, the proposed research model would expectedly contribute to enhancing knowledge building in the specific domain of maritime disruption management and supply chain management overall while providing meaningful managerial implications to policymakers and managers in the maritime industry.Originality/valueThis research is perhaps one of the first studies which presents a systematic review of literature in maritime disruption management and proposes a future research framework that establishes the link between disruption management and resilience and organisational performance for empirical validation.
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Since January 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread impacts on virtually every sector of the global economy, including world trade and global supply chains. [...]it has been argued that the existing globalised economies might require to be restructured in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic when governments and firms start to re-strategize their critical supply chains through various disruption and resilience management strategies. [...]other shipping intermediaries, i.e. freight forwarders and logistics service providers, who play crucial roles in connecting demand and supply of maritime supply chains also suffered due to reduced business transactions. [...]the focus of this special issue is on understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on various players in the maritime supply chain, as well as possible trends of global trade and maritime supply chains and strategies and policies in the aftermath of the pandemic.
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Purpose This paper aims to explore the comparative analysis of marketing strategies between seaports and dry ports. Second, this paper proposes a recommendation to improve marketing approaches in both nodes.Design/methodology/approach This research analyzes current marketing approaches to improve the freight volume and enhance interrelation between them for a comprehensive collaboration in the freight supply chain. This research employed semi-structured interviews via an e-interview questionnaire.Findings The result shows that dry port and seaport practice a mixed marketing strategy. Some marketing elements that a seaport applies are also applied by a dry port, like focusing on the target customer, joining exhibitions and face-to-face meetings. Customized service to clients, frequent discussion on the effective marketing plans and increasing the facilities at the seaport and dry ports can improve the marketing strategies in dry port and seaports.Originality/value Seaports are the critical components in esteem-driven context, which add to supply chains by creating value-added services in the transport chain. Nonetheless, research between dry ports and seaports has increasingly drawn the attention of scholars during the last decade. Having said like that, there have not been any pragmatic studies undertaken in the Malaysian context that mainly discusses the marketing prospect of the dry ports and seaports especially during COVID-19 outbreak.
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Maritime security is facing many challenges due to war conflicts, geopolitics, sanctions, and pandemics. The supply chain for maritime containers has faced considerable obstacles as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Numerous factors, such as port closures, travel restrictions, and a decreased workforce, have impacted the supply chain. The risk of cargo theft, piracy, and other security events has increased as a result of these difficulties. Therefore, it is essential to look at the risk variables that may affect the security of the marine container supply chain during the pandemic. This research paper highlights those risks through the following three indexes: the likelihood index (LI), severity index (SI), and average risk index (ARI) by analyzing 64 risk factors that were prepared and designed by incorporating the Delphi expert survey technique to prepare a systematic questionnaire. The article addresses worries over the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on international supply networks. The causes of the most recent global shipping industry disruptions and their impact on supply chains have been thoroughly examined. In order to reduce the number of disruptions in global supply chains and lower the direct and indirect costs for consumers, the authors have also mentioned the necessary actions that must be implemented. The results concluded after the analysis pointed to "management activities,” such as human resources or the working environment as having the highest possibility of going wrong, whereas "operation activities” were judged to likely be the fatal ones if the security of maritime containers was ever compromised. The main objective of the study is to evaluate how the COVID-19 epidemic may affect international shipping, particularly container shipping, which is currently the most important link in the world's multimodal land–sea supply chains.
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PurposeIn past years, the global supply chain has witnessed devastating effects of coronavirus (COVID-19) disease. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has renewed the interest of the Sustainable Supply Chain (SSC) stakeholders on sustainability. The stakeholders are now rethinking their business processes and strategy to make them sustainable. In this context, the relevant literature is required to support emerging markets to formulate sustainability-focussed strategies. The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of potential antecedents that leads towards sustainable development of freight transportation in emerging markets.Design/methodology/approachInitially, the antecedents of the Sustainable Freight Transport (SFT) system are derived from the literature survey followed by verification from the experts. Then, the potential antecedents are categorized under four (social, organizational, operational and environmental) broad categories. Afterwards, a Neutrosophic Analytic Network Process (N-ANP) method is employed to obtain the priority weights of the identified potential antecedents.FindingsThe paper identified and ranked 17 antecedents of the SFT system. According to the study's findings, the top three antecedents of SFT are "the presence of a multimodal transportation system,” "circularity in SFT” and "traffic congestion management”. The results from the study advocate the promotion of existing multi-modal transport facilities which is promising to achieve sustainability. The results suggested the adoption of the digital twin to manage the transport operations.Originality/valueThis study sheds light on how to achieve sustainability in the freight transportation system post-COVID era highlighting the potential antecedents. The study's findings will assist practitioners in developing SFT strategies in the face of such pandemics in future.
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In the maritime industry, The unanticipated COVID-19 viral epidemic is an unforeseeable circumstance, and other nations implemented enormous containment measures to stop the Coronavirus epidemic from spreading around the world. Thus, directly affecting the maritime shipping sector. This paper will discuss the current problems facing the shipping industry, taking into account the congestion problems, delays, and uncertainty timeframes, using the Los Angeles port as a case study. These problems and more were addressed directly by increasing the operating hours, workload, and available staff, and indirectly by looking for alternatives for shipping goods, and creating more cargo space, furthermore, this study will use Monte Carlo simulation to predict the effectiveness of these solutions on the congestion at the port.
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PurposeThis study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-being and mental health of the seafarers who had to overstay on ships after their contracts expired, identifies topics that affect their mental distress and recommends measures to overcome these.Design/methodology/approachFour research questions about the impacts on the seafarers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic were raised. A literature review and a questionnaire survey were conducted to find answers. Ship officers were asked to assess and fill in the questionnaires for the stranded seafarers onboard in order to collect sufficient samples rapidly for this study.FindingsDespite the guidelines provided by the shipping companies being adequate to protect the seafarers from COVID-19, their mental distress levels have been worsened under the pandemic. The crew change crisis causes anxiety and negatively impacts on their working performance;however, the repatriation expectation of the stranded seafarers is of the highest concern. Three topics were identified as having impacts on the mental health of the stranded seafarers: crew change crisis, low vaccination rate and the lack of key worker recognition. While international stakeholders are advocating for support in these issues, the shipping companies and the seafarers need to do their parts to exacerbate the mental distress, and to survive and thrive beyond the pandemic.Originality/valueThe findings of this study will help the shipping companies to navigate the challenges and the seafarers to overcome issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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This paper focuses on the analysis of the COVID-19 effects on passenger shipping in Danish waters as an example and aims to analyse the differences in passenger vessel activities and emissions before and after the COVID-19 outbreak. Two sets of Automatic Identification System (AIS) data for the passenger ships sailing in Danish waters associated with the whole year respectively for 2020 and 2019 are used for a comprehensive evaluation of the passenger shipping activities in the region by means of the analysis of variance and bottom-up emission models. A comparison of those results based on the two datasets shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has a major impact on cruise ships, with a significant reduction in the number of ships, average speed, and average draught. In contrast, the pandemic has a smaller impact on ferry-pax only and ferry-ro pax vessels. The effects can also be seen from the fact that, after the COVID-19 outbreak, SOx emissions from cruise ships, ferry-pax only and ferry-ro pax vessels were reduced by 50.71%, 0.51% and 0.82%, respectively. This investigation provides an important reference for policy makers in the marine environment sector.
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This study extends the existing literature in this area by examining the connectedness and shock spillover between commodity and shipping markets using a new novel time-varying frequency and quantile connectedness method developed by Chatziantoniou et al (2022) based on B&K (2018) and Ando et al (2018). Connectedness and shock transmission between the markets were analysed with daily data covering July 4, 2012 to July 20, 2022. A major value added of this study to the existing literature is the examination of the asymmetric effect of commodity price changes (or return) on the connectedness of the markets. Mean-frequency total connectedness analysis indicates that, the overall shipping market (BDI) is both the transmitter (to) and receiver of the highest shock from the entire market connectedness system. In the short-term, the agricultural markets dominate as both the transmitters and receivers of the major shocks to and from the entire market system, while in the medium-term, the shipping markets dominate as both the transmitters and receivers of the largest shocks to the entire market system. However, in the long-term, connectedness and shock propagation were very low. The time-varying quantile analysis reveals that, connectedness was very strong before, during and after COVID-19 at the bearish and bullish market conditions. Further, the time-varying frequency connectedness analysis shows that, although total connectedness is relatively high overtime, it was propelled by short-term dynamics. Metal markets are connected among themselves, and with both agricultural and shipping markets. Agricultural markets are connected among themselves, and with shipping markets, which are only connected among themselves. There is evidence of the asymmetric effect of commodity return dynamics on the connectedness of the markets. Some important policy recommendations were drawn from the findings.
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As a key enabler of international trade, the container shipping market experienced port congestion, space shortages, and skyrocketing freight rates following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this paper first utilizes the vector autoregressive model with exogenous variables (VARX) to analyze the interactive mechanisms of economy, capacity, freight rate, and port congestion during the pandemic to identify the causes behind the excessive market volatility. We then introduce government supervision to improve the policy deficiencies in pricing rules and assess whether prohibiting liner companies from charging excessive surcharges can solve market dilemmas by constructing a tripartite evolutionary game model. The results show that liner companies deliberately maintained congestion by using strict control over shipping capacity to raise freight rates and obtain high profits, which is one of the main reasons for the problems. However, we also conclude that relying solely on the spontaneous behavior of the market is unlikely to resolve the predicament. Instead, government intervention can play a crucial role in encouraging liner companies to increase appropriate container capacity, stabilize freight rates, and mitigate the risk of supply chain disruptions due to port congestion. This, in turn, can enhance the resilience of the container transport system.
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This paper examines the effect of security oversight on air cargo price and demand. We exploit variations in security oversight instituted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). We estimate a simultaneous equation model using proprietary operations data from a major airline in South Korea over the period 2009–2013. This study explores the shipping-charge behavior of a service provider through a modeling approach that considers air cargo security. Our findings show that security oversight increases air cargo demand, controlling for the effect of price. Improving security measures increases the air cargo price, but the magnitude of this increase is small. Our results should help policymakers gauge the benefit of improved security and help airlines design an effective model to determine future air cargo shipping charges under high uncertainty to mitigate short- and long-term financial risks.
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The shipping industry has faced two major challenges during 2019-2022: the implementation of International Maritime Organization (IMO) norms on the maximum allowed sulfur concentration to be 0.5% in marine fuel, which also are known as IMO 2020 norms, from Jan 1, 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted normal operations. The next challenges that the shipping industry is expected to face are the decarbonization 2030 and 2050 norms. This article will focus on the aftermaths of the IMO 2020 norms and the COVID-19 pandemic on the marine lubricants industry and how it is likely to evolve in the future as the shipping industry tries to meet the decarbonization targets.
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To cater to the gradually increasing sizes of ships, several traditional container ports in East Asia built deep-water wharves to attract shipping carriers to berth, a decision that is considered highly reasonable because it allows for shipping carriers to gain a cost advantage. For traditional Far East/Europe (F/E) trunk routes, shipping carriers must deploy vessels that are large enough at hub ports to maintain low transshipment costs. However, for a port to attract shipping carriers, it should be able to first meet the cargo demand of these carriers. The port would also need to improve the loading ratio to enjoy the cost advantage. Simultaneously, the port should leverage the loading and unloading efficiency of the terminal to gain a competitive advantage. Although the port congestion observed at the F/E trunk during COVID-19 was not as serious as that in North American ports, it was sufficient to affect the route deployment and port selection decisions of shipping carriers. Currently, because the size of container carriers is the most critical factor in the reduction of shipping costs, as demonstrated in this study, the upsizing trend of container ships is regarded as a highly relevant aspect in the deployment of trunk routes and the selection of hub ports. © 2023 National Taiwan Ocean University.
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To achieve environmental sustainability on ships, stakeholders should make efforts to reduce emissions. Port authorities are crucial to attain this goal by introducing new policies. This study takes the Port of Long Beach as an example to assess port-wide ship emissions and explain the significance of shore power policy. Additionally, the study considers the impact of disruptions, such as the COVID pandemic, on ship emissions. The analysis compares data from three years before and after the pandemic to examine the relationship between ship waiting times, quantities, and emissions. The findings indicate that the majority of port-wide ship emissions are generated by berthing or anchoring vessels, from ship auxiliary engines and boilers. Furthermore, ship congestion due to reduced port productivity during the pandemic significantly increased emissions from berthing and anchoring vessels, with the emission proportion increasing from 68% to 86%. Adopting the shore power policy has effectively reduced ship emissions in port areas, and increasing the number of ships utilising shore power will be instrumental in tackling excessive ship emissions.
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The development of coastal shipping (CS) in Africa has been identified as a way to bolster the continent's freight transport network. Thus, our study examined the recent CS experiences of three regional shipping lines in sub Saharan Africa (SSA)-Ocean Africa Container Lines, Adom Mbroso Transport and United Africa Feeder Line-operating respectively in Southern, West and East Africa. We employed an in-depth case-study approach involving semi-structured interviews with senior managers, which enabled us to discover and understand the real-life phenomenon of successfully operating CS services in SSA today and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the three companies. Our study revealed gaps that need to be addressed in order to develop maritime transport in Africa's subregions, namely by clarifying the predicted appropriateness and credibility of different policies and which elements are more likely to generate positive behavioural change in regional shipping lines. It also revealed major barriers for CS, including customs, a lack of intra-regionally traded cargo and high tariffs and low efficiency at port. Although the establishment of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area and 2050 Africa's Integrated Maritime Strategy have clearly had positive effects, African states need to implement the policies in concert as well as improve the performance of ports. Last, concerning the pandemic, COVID-19-related restrictions have decreased transport demand for CS in SSA and limited crew changes, shore leaves and cargo operations. Although business viability has been negatively affected as a consequence, freight rates have increased across SSA and thus improved the sustainability of CS.
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Purpose - The purpose of this study is to analyze the market power of the Korea Container Shipping Market (Intra Asia, Korea-Europe, and Korea-U.S.) to verify the existence of collusion empirically, and to answer whether the joint actions of liner market participants in Korea have formed market dominance for each route. Precisely, it will be verified through the Lerner index as to whether the regional market of Asia is a monopoly, oligopoly, or perfect competition. Design/methodology - This study used a Lerner index adjusted with elasticity presented in the New Imperial Organization (NEIO) studies. NEIO refers to a series of empirical studies that estimate parameters to judge market power from industrial data. This study uses B-L empirical models by Bresnahan (1982) and Lau (1982). In addition, NEIO research data statistically contain self-regression and stability problems as price and time series data. A dynamic model following Steen and Salvanes' Error Correction Model was used to solve this problem. Findings - The empirical results are as follows. First, lambda, representing market power, is nearly zero in all three markets. Second, the Korean shipping market shows low demand elasticity on average. Nevertheless, the markup is low, a characteristic that is difficult to see in other industries. Third, the Korean shipping market generally remains close to perfect competition from 2014 to 2022, but extreme market power appears in a specific period, such as COVID-19. Fourth, there was no market power in the Intra Asia market from 2008 to 2014. Originality/value - Doubts about perfect competition in the liner market continued, but there were few empirical cases. This paper confirmed that the Korea liner market is a perfect competition market. This paper is the first to implement dynamics using ECM and recursive regression to demonstrate market power in the Korean liner market by dividing the shipping market into Deep Sea and Intra Asia separately. It is also the first to prove the most controversial problems in the current shipping industry numerically and academically.
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The freight rate is a representative variable in the shipping market and is characterized by a cyclical re-lationship. Even though downturns in the shipping market, such as the shipping industry recession in the 1980s, the global financial crisis in 2008 and COVID-19 crisis in 2020, recur, few studies have analyzed the dynamic relationship between supply and demand in terms of its effect on freight rates. Thus, this study classifies the factors affecting fluctuations in dry cargo freight rates into demand, supply, and freight rate specific demand factors, which play the most important role in managing risk in the shipping market. Based on the recursive structural vector autoregressive (recursive SVAR) model, we analyze the historical con-tributions of the effects of each factor across different time periods. Two main findings are summarized as follows: first, we identify the dynamic relationship between factors affecting BDI in the shipping market, and reveal that the magnitude and direction of factors are different. Second, we verify that in an extreme situation in which freight rates exceed the normal range, the market is overheated, and freight rates are therefore determined by the freight rate specific demand of market participants rather than by the actual supply and demand.(c) 2023 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Korean Association of Shipping and Logistics, Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creative-commons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
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In recent years, the maritime trade of crude oil has suffered notable perturbations caused by the unbalanced relationship between supply and demand. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a drop in oil consumption in 2019, followed by a reduction in production in 2020. The seaborne transport of oil accounts for approximately 50–60% of all crude oil in world production. The crude oil market is a crucial regulator of the global economy and instabilities in this market have noticeable effects on collective risks. The immediate risks that the society see are the changes in the cost of living, which are followed by political uncertainties. Less visible are the risks that these uncertainties have on shipping companies and the level of management stability they have to maintain in order to keep seagoing safe. This paper presents an update on the overall state of risk management for the crude oil tanker fleet, evidenced by EMSA and other international marine organisations. The previous paper, entitled Safety Assessment of Crude Oil Tankers, which applied the methodology of the Formal Safety Assessment (FSA), was published in 2018 and covered the historical data related to the fleet size, accident reports, amount of oil spilled on sea and the economic value of the crude oil transport business. The particular focus of this paper is on the evolution of the risk acceptance criteria over the years and the difference in the predictions from 2018 to the present day. The effects of the pandemic on crude oil shipping are discussed through the changes in the risks. Three of them are analysed: PLL (potential loss of lives), PLC (potential loss of containment) and PLP (potential loss of property). The representation of the risk applies the F-N curves among the risk acceptance criteria lines observed for different tanker sizes. Among the three risks, the paper exposes the vulnerability of the loss of containment risk, where the strong economic impact of the oil trade outweighs the environmental concerns. In relation to the PLC, the paper proposes the approach of relating the oil spill acceptability with the spill quantity and ship revenue instead of to the cost of cleaning or the cost of environment recovery.