Carriers' role in opening gateways: experiences from major port regions

Over the last 15 years container ports experienced a dramatic increase in throughput. Such growth imposed a tremendous pressure to gateway ports which, despite the enormous financial efforts in new nfrastructures and the success of the reform, found difficulties in keeping the pace of maritime traffic flows. In turn, this emerging bottleneck had an impact on top carriers' strategies that were willing to exploit the opportunities offered by the rising container trade. Therefore, despite the growing vessel size and the economic need of concentrating traffic flows in a smaller number of ports per range, shipping lines needed to geographically expand and diversify their services, multiplying their entry points in high-growth regions such as North America, Far-East and Europe. With this context the paper aims to investigate trends in major port ranges. In order to analyse such changes, we will use a database on the weekly capacity provided by shipping lines and alliances in major gateway ports for some selected years. The analysis of maritime strategies of top shipping lines revealed their behaviour in selecting ports as well as in building new corridors in congested port regions. The database highlights the evolution of the port hierarchy per range and per shipping line. The application of the Gini coefficient as measure of inequality, is used to demonstrate how leading shipping lines concentrate/de-concentrate their operations across various port ranges. The analysis reveals that this on-going process is very differentiated, depending both on the range typology and the shipping line strategy.