Book Description

The liner shipping industry has seen many changes in the past decade. Economic and environmental factors have contributed to the construction and deployment of everlarger ships. As a result, overcapacities have developed on the primary trade routes, which forced shipping operators to redeploy previously used ships on secondary trade routes. This redeployment is defined as cascading and affects all stakeholders in the liner shipping industry. This thesis aims to examine these cascading effects on services that connected the West Coast of South America with the Far East and Europe in the past decade. Hence, a particular focus was placed on services that call either at the Peruvian ports of Callao or Paita. Currently, available literature examines cascading effects with respect to ship sizes. However, this thesis argues that more dimensions should be explored. For the empirical analysis, historical scheduled transit data was collected. Furthermore, global trade routes were identified and classified based on their monthly trade volume. To identify possible dimensions of cascading, a ship-specific database was created. The results determine an increase in all ship-specific physical dimensions and improved connectivity to Asia, while the connectivity to Europe decreased. Additionally, more ships with environmental equipment, such as Scrubber instalments, cascaded to the analysed services in the past decade. The findings are used to suggest managerial implications for ports and shippers. Moreover, the limitations of this thesis are stated, as well as implications for future research.