Freight Integration in Liner Shipping: A Strategy Serving Global Production Networks

摘要

Container shipping lines are well aware of the growing importance of global production networks. While continuing to focus on improving the fundamentals, many shipping lines have developed a keen interest in other segments of the logistics and transportation market to offer integrated and worldwide services to global production networks. This paper aims to assess the overall level of freight integration in thirty-four shipping lines, and provides an insight into the extent to which freight integration serves as a business model in liner shipping. The results point to a great variety and range of freight integration in the shipping business. Each carrier leverages its service portfolio to develop specific capabilities. There is clearly no single best strategy for the whole liner shipping industry to serve global production networks.