Global Shipping Industry Research Articles

Partnership proposed for ocean observation

A report released on 1 March 2012 proposes a formal partnership between the ocean‐observing communities and the global shipping industry for the systematic long‐term study of the ocean water column from surface to depth. According to the report, the rationale for the proposal is that commercial ships on the high seas offer a cost‐effective opportunity to contribute to directly addressing a significant observational deficiency. “The ocean is vastly under observed, particularly below the ocean surface, where satellites cannot measure the ocean's properties,” according to the report, “OceanScope: A proposed partnership between the maritime industries and the ocean observing community to monitor the global ocean water column,” prepared by the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research/International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (SCOR/IAPSO) Working Group 133. “Observations below the surface depend on getting platforms (ships, moored buoys, floats, gliders, etc.) to locations far beyond the coasts, which can be expensive,” the report states.

Greener Pastures: Outside Options and Strategic Alliance Withdrawal

Departing from prior work that demonstrates the stickiness and stability of alliance networks resulting from embeddedness, we extend matching theory to study firms’ withdrawal from alliances. Viewing alliance withdrawal as a result of firms’ pursuit of more promising alternative partners – outside options – rather than failures in collaboration, we predict that a firm is more likely to withdraw from an alliance when there is a higher density of outside options that have better match quality than the current partners. We also propose that, because matching is two-sided, outside options have a greater impact on a firm’s withdrawal when they are more likely to initiate new alliances. Using data on alliances in the global liner shipping industry, we show that, controlling for internal tensions in the alliance, outside options predict alliance withdrawals. Thus, despite the alliance stickiness and stability, firms alter their alliances in response to the availability of promising outside options, even leaving alliances that appear successful.

Discussion on Technical Defense against Piracy for Ocean-Going Ships

It is well known that Somali pirates frequently hijack ships, which has great negative impact on the global shipping industry. To crack down on the pirates’ abominable crime is a common challenge that all shipping practitioner face. The international community has paid close attention to the issue of piracy. In view of the present situation, the author gives a summarization of piracy attacks in recent years in this paper, further to analyze in detail the background and characteristics of frequent piracy attacks and provide some suggestions on the specific preventive measures to deal with the problem.

The Global Labour Market for Filipino and South African Seafarers in theMerchant Navy

ABSTRACT This article examines how profound shifts in the global labour market for seafarers have impacted on the labour market for South African and Filipino seafarers in the merchant navy. The article contends that the shift towards flag of convenience (FoC) shipping in the global shipping industry is a business strategy by ship owners to circumvent high labour costs and fiscal regimes. However, despite the shift to FoC shipping, wage rates and unionisation levels remain high for both Filipino and South African seafarers. Through extensive surveys of seafarers as well as drawing on secondary literature, the article demonstrates that the globalisation of labour markets and industries does not always imply an erosion of the bargaining power of organised labour.

The Nonexistence of Sustainability in International Maritime Shipping: Issues For Consideration

There is an ongoing practice in the international shipping community that impacts fundamental notions of sustainability as defined in the peer-reviewed literature (WCED, 1987; Gladwin, Kennelly & Krause, 1995; McManus, 1996, Naess, 2003; McGregor, 2004). The practice is based in discounting the true costs of maritime shipping through a system of open registries. By engaging in such practices, there is an inherent failure by the international community to internalize the true costs (environmental, social, labor, etc.) associated with shipping. The result is a practice that artificially keeps the international costs of maritime shipping low at the expense of environmental and labor concerns. This paper will identify the methods by which this generalized unsustainable practice is carried out, and link the practices to environmental policy failures at both domestic and international scales. While the main purpose of the paper is to serve as a scoping piece to identify the unsustainable practices of the international maritime industry, some general insights are also offered to suggest research directions that may aid in ensuring our global maritime shipping industry better internalizes generally accepted principles of sustainability. Work beyond this paper should focus on in-depth analyses and case studies to further develop the general principles discussed herein.

Piracy in the Gulf of Aden: Naval Challenges

Piracy in the Gulf of Aden, which first emerged as a serious threat in 2005, has since grown manifold, virtually doubling with each passing year between 2006 and 2009. In 2010, though, there was a slight dip in the number of attacks by the Somali pirates the range of piracy attacks has increased significantly. The response of the global community has been remarkably swift. The UN resolution 1816 of 2008 which first authorised nations to deploy warships for counter-piracy operations in Somali territorial waters has since been followed by several international initiatives. Currently over two dozen warships are deployed in the region on anti piracy patrols. Yet, attacks by Somali pirates continue unabated. This paper seeks to highlight the key challenges faced by naval patrols in the Gulf of Aden and brings out the various options that exist for the global shipping industry.

Schiffsfinanzierung in Deutschland

Ship finance in Germany. Challenges ahead. Despite its relatively short coastline, Germany is one of the leading economies in the global shipping industry. Although the focal point of the global shipbuilding industry has shifted eastwards by degrees over the past few decades, Germany has become one of the leading economies for shipping-related services, in particular ship financing. Many of the most important lenders both private and public are located in Germany, enabling Hamburg in particular to become one of the key locations for global ship financing. However, ship financing in Germany has been heavily hit by the global financial and economic crisis since mid 2008. The partly dysfunctional lending market has led to a significant credit crunch which could endanger Germany´s leading position in the global ship financing market going forward. Some of the large commercial banks from China have recently entered the European ship financing market, and it looks like the focal point of lending capacity could shift eastwards - just as shipbuilding capacities shifted from Europe to Asia over the past few decades.

Built to Last but Falling Apart: Cohesion, Friction, and Withdrawal from Interfirm Alliances

Although models of alliance network dynamics have focused primarily on alliance formation, this study advances research by investigating member withdrawal from alliances. We develop a model of cohesion and friction at the relationship, network, and market levels and propose cross-level cohesion and time-varying effects on member withdrawal, giving predictions that are distinct from those of alliance formation studies. Our analysis of alliances in the global liner shipping industry showed greater withdrawal rates as a result of market competition and time-dependent effects of prior direct and third-party ties, suggesting that member withdrawal has both social and task-related causes.

The environmental impacts of pollutants generated by routine shipping operations on ports

The environmental impacts generated by shipping operations have increasingly become an important research topic, where its pollutants often pose negative externalities to natural habitats and economic losses to coastal areas. While the environmental impact costs generated by shipping disasters, notably large scale accidental oil spills, have been widely studied, hitherto, works dedicated to the assessment of environmental impact costs of pollutants generated by routine shipping operations remain scarce due to their relatively implicit nature and thus delays of consequential risks. Hence, by proposing an economic model and calibrating it to Port of Rotterdam, this paper assesses the environmental impact costs generated by routine shipping operations on ports. By shedding light on this important, but under-researched, issue critical to the well-being of the global shipping industry, this paper provides a decent framework for further research in sustainable shipping and port management for future generations.

Redesigning Organizations for the 21st Century:: Lessons from the Global Shipping Industry

Redesigning Organizations for the 21st Century:: Lessons from the Global Shipping Industry

Global shipping IPOs performance

We analyze the short- and long-run price performance of 143 global shipping IPOs listed during the 1984–2007 period in major stock exchanges, computing Buy-and-Hold Abnormal Returns (BHARs) and Cumulative Average Returns (CARs). We find the average underpricing for shipping IPOs to be 17.69%. The light underpricing is positively related to the age of the firm, the reputation of the stock exchange the IPO is listed in and the market condition of the period in which the firm went public, and negatively related to the reputation of the underwriters. In the long run, shipping IPOs underperform after a five-month holding period. Specifically, using the BHARs as a benchmark for long-run performance, we reveal that investors who buy immediately after listing and hold shares for 3 years will make a loss of 15.72%. The conclusions suggested by this survey of the global shipping industry surprises us regarding the maturity in the behavior of its investors.

Pandora's locks: the opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway

The St. Lawrence Seaway was considered one of the world's greatest engineering achievements when it opened in 1959. The $1 billion project - a series of locks, canals, and dams that tamed the ferocious St. Lawrence River - opened the Great Lakes to the global shipping industry. Linking ports on lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario to shipping hubs on the world's seven seas increased global trade in the Great Lakes region. But it came at an extraordinarily high price. Foreign species that immigrated into the lakes unleashed a biological shift that reconfigured the world's largest freshwater ecosystems. Pandora's Locks is the story of politicians and engineers who, driven by hubris and handicapped by ignorance, demanded that the Seaway be built at any cost. It is the tragic tale of government agencies that could have prevented ocean freighters from laying waste to the Great Lakes ecosystems, but failed to act until it was too late. Blending science with compelling personal accounts, this book is the first comprehensive account of how inviting transoceanic freighters into North America's freshwater seas transformed these wondrous lakes.

Entry in the global liner shipping industry: a population ecology study, 1996–2006

This study examines the global population of container liners and their trade route entry patterns from 1996 to 2006. Concepts from population ecology (population density, forces of legitimacy, competition and imitation, and the liability of smallness) are applied to empirically test the probability of entry by liners into a particular trade route. The findings show that entry into trade routes follows an inverted-U shaped (∩) relationship with the number of players operating in the trade route, increases with the number of trade routes operated by a player, and has a sharper inverted-U shaped relationship for Asian and North American firms. These findings, from the first comprehensive population level study of the liner shipping industry, provide insights into the strategic decision of entry into trade routes made by liner shipping firms during an 11-year period.

Building a labor anthropology

At the port of Charleston, South Carolina in January of 2000, members of the predominantly African-American Local 1422 of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) picketed a ship being unloaded by nonunion workers. Their picket turned into a police riot, and in the aftermath, five dockworkers were arrested and charged with a felony. On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5 by writer and former union organizer Suzan Erem and anthropologist E. Paul Durrenberger is an account of the successful international campaign on behalf of these workers. I attended an event sponsored by the New York City Charleston 5 Defense Committee in 2001. Defense committees were formed throughout the country, and there were dozens of meetings like this one. At the New York event, held in Brooklyn's Lafayette Presbyterian Church, an institution well known for its support of progressive causes, I listened to Local 1422 president Ken Riley and Bill Fletcher (then assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO) explain that the dockworkers were under house arrest and faced five years in jail. They also told us that the small, 600 member local was being sued for millions by both the shipping company, Nordana, and the union-busting stevedoring firm, WSI. As I learned that evening, and as Erem and Durrenberger masterfully show in On the Global Waterfront, this was not an ordinary labor-management dispute. The stakes were so high that they suggested class interest and struggle that went well beyond the particular conflict. The political ambition of the state Attorney General Charlie Condon was on the table. Condon pushed the Charleston police to up the riot charges to a felony so he could summon South Carolina's racist and anti-union legacy as he used this case to pursue higher office. Also at stake was the intense pressure for capital accumulation in the global shipping industry, a sector that used containerization for decades to

Global Shipping IPOs Performance

We analyze the short and long-run price performance of 143Global Shipping IPOs listed during the 1984-2007 period in major Stock Exchanges computing buy and hold abnormal returns (BHAR) and cumulative abnormal returns (CAR). We find average underpricing for shipping IPOs is 17.69%. The light underpricing is positively related to the age of the firm, the reputation of the stock exchange they reach listing and the market condition of the period they go public and negatively related to the reputation of the underwriters. In the long-run, Shipping IPOs underperform after five months holding period. Specifically using the buy-and hold returns as a measurement for long-run performance, we find that investors who buy immediately after listing and hold shares for three years will make a loss of 15.72%. The survey suggests that global shipping industry surprises us regarding the maturity in the behavior of its investors.

Shipbreaking in the Developing World: Problems and Prospects

The global shipping industry relies upon the developing world to dispose of retired deep-sea vessels through the process of shipbreaking. In doing so the industry avoids the burdens of complying with developed world standards for the management of hazardous waste. Occupational and environmental health (OEH) risks associated with dismantling of beached ships, primarily in India and Bangladesh, are significant. Worldwide concerns about these risks, which arose in the late 1990s, and activism by domestic organizations appear to be gathering momentum for global and domestic OEH reforms. This article addresses recent developments in characterizing these risks and in proposals to control them.

Human resources in the German maritime industries: ‘back-sourcing’ and ship management

In today's global shipping industry have management functions often been outsourced to separate companies and to overseas locations. With the appearance of socalled ‘flags of convenience’ the world shipping industry has increasingly registered commercial vessels overseas. Following this trend, human resource management functions have also been relocated, with the opening of recruitment offices and the use of HR agencies outside OECD countries. Recently, new German regulation has sought to attract previously outsourced HRM functions back to Germany. A case study of such a newly established firm, called ‘Reimarus’, will exemplify the impact of the new regulation on HR firms in shipping. The following paper analyses this process based on an empirical study of Germany's commercial shipping industry.

Alliance or acquisition? Strategies for growth in the container shipping industry, the case of CP ships

The global shipping industry is undergoing a transformation through the establishment of strategic alliances involving nearly all the major carriers. The near universality of the phenomenon would lead one to believe that being part of a global alliance is the only means of survival today. The case of CP Ships, the maritime arm of Canadian Pacific, provides a radically different model. CP Ships began as a small market player, but through direct acquisition has grown in size to be comparable with many of the large global carriers. It has remained focused as a niche player, venturing to confront the mainline carriers only peripherally. This paper explores the bases for CP Ship's success, highlighting the fact that alliances need not be the only path to survival in a global industry.

The Structure of Ownership and the Theory of the Firm

The separation of ownership from control produces a condition where the interests of owner and of ultimate manager may, and often do, diverge, and where many of the checks which formerly operated to limit the use of power disappear.... In creating these new relationships, the quasi-public corporation may fairly be said to work a revolution. It ... has divided ownership into nominal ownership and the power formerly joined to it. Thereby the corporation has changed the nature of profit-seeking enterprise.1