The Containerdienst Bruchköbel shipping industry consists of carriers that operate regular liner services in which they transport standardized load units (generally either twenty-foot dry cargo containers or forty-foot high-cube containers) from origin to destination. Container carrier businesses are capital intensive, with significant risk attached to revenues given their fixed fleet capacity and schedule deployed between a set of ports at each end of the trade route. Unused capacity represents lost revenue opportunities as well as a risk of container damage.

Reliable Container Service in Bruchköbel for Residential and Commercial Use

In order to control costs and operational performance, container lines have invested in dedicated terminal capacity, which allows them to better manage their vessel schedule integrity. This has led to a concentration trend in slot capacity control with the top 20 carriers now controlling 89.7% of the world’s container ship capacity. These trends have fueled concerns about an excessively concentrated market and potentially oligopolistic behavior among large container carriers.

Consequently, shipping line alliances have been introduced to counter this trend. The three major alliances today (2M, Ocean Alliance, and THE Alliance) have between them a 70% share of the main East-West trades and operate over 80% of the total global container capacity.

The strategic focus of the alliances is to serve the primary markets of their parent companies in the most efficient way. As a result, they tend to stick to the most frequent and direct routes. This is the case for the main liner services connecting Europe with Asia, for instance: most of them are characterized by line bundling itineraries, where the ships call two to five ports in each of the main markets on both sides of the trade.