Maritime Networks: a source of competitiveness for shipping lines. In : International Handbook of Maritime Business

The generally accepted view nowadays appears to be that as a result of the impact of containerization shipping lines propose similar maritime services with identical vessels. As the maritime companies are unable to create a comparative advantage on the sea, they attempt to do so on inland services. However, it was by developing new maritime capacity that the Asian shipping lines asserted themselves in the 1980s and new European shipping lines such as MSC or CMA asserted themselves as very large global carriers in the 1990s and 2000s. Our hypothesis is that the maritime line remains the core activity of the shipping lines. The maritime networks of the shipping lines are not the same from the geographical standpoint. The competitiveness of a shipping line depends partly on its capacity to operate a maritime network which is differentiated from that of its competitors. Once we have justified our hypothesis, we shall propose a method for studying the networks of shipping lines using our database on Weekly Containerized Transport Capacity (WCTW). We shall then show that the Asian shipping lines, which are grouped together in large alliances, differ from the European shipping lines Maersk, MSC and CMA. This leads us to propose a historical interpretation, based on the unequal power of the maritime networks, in order to explain the upheavals that have occurred in the global hierarchy of shipping lines, firstly in favour of the Asian shipping lines in the 1980s which gave way, from the 1990s, to the new dominance of 3 European shipping lines - Maersk, MSC and CMA