The Evolving Role of Mediterranean Ports in the Deep-sea Trade Patterns

摘要

In the 1980s despite the fairly vigorous development of the global demand, the Mediterranean sea was considered exclusively as a distinct market and it was linked separately to Asia, North America and Northern Europe. Then in the 1990s the largest liner shipping companies decided to include the Mediterranean sea in the oceanic routes, not only for the growing trade flows between the Far East and the Banana Blue region in Europe, but also as a result of the privatization of some Mediterranean ports. In particular, after the realisation of the Common Market in the European Union, ports were interested into widening served region to expand their hinterland beyond national borders. Thus the multi-call services of the 1980s have been enriched by hub and spokes network services. Thanks to the birth of transhipment hubs, such as Gioia Tauro and Malta, located near the ideal route Suez-Gibraltar, the role of Mediterranean has been changing and the deployment of bigger container-ships should strength this scenario. Moreover, since a few years ago Northern range ports are more congested than Mediterranean ones and the liners have to face a growing contractual strength by the pure stevedores due to the high market concentration and to the resulting lack of competition in the most important load centres. Due to congestion and environmental problems road and rail transport from Northern range ports is becoming more expensive. This situation is forcing to the choice of alternative ports in the Mediterranean sea and to a consequent rationalization of transportation network. In this scenario global container terminal operators became investors in some privatized ports and, with main emphasis, in "green-field projects". In particular Italian peninsula is an ideal area to create transhipment hubs able to catch cargo coming from Asia Over the last decade players such as PSA Corporation, P&O Ports, Contship Italia and Evergreen bought shares in Genoa, Cagliari, Gioia Tauro and Taranto respectively. More recently, in order to achieve a greater network flexibility and to supply new solutions to shippers, some liners began to invest in Mediterranean facilities thus following the examples of Evergreen and Maersk. The Chinese Cosco has interest in Italian ports but also the independent carriers MSC and CMA-CGM have understood the importance of the integration along the transport chain and they recently obtained port concessions in Italy and Ranee respectively. A further important step towards the acquisition of a substantial quota of deep-sea trade has been the introduction of "ad-hoc" intermodal services from some Italian ports. In fact a couple of years ago, following the example of European Rail Shuttle, a joint venture between Maersk-Sealand and P&O Nedlloyd, Eurogate founded an intermodal company aiming at creating a corridor from Gioia Tauro to Hamburg, widening the hinterland of its Italian ports. This initiative has been followed by others such as, for instance, the Medgate Shuttle project supplied by Hupac in co-operation with the PSA terminal in Genoa. Moreover the world leader Maersk-Sealand has an ancient interest to setup a dedicated terminal in Genoa that would represent an alternative gateway to get to the Central European market.