Korean liner shipping in the era of global alliances
Helen A. Thanopoulou,
Dong-Keun Ryoo and
Tae-Woo Lee
Maritime Policy & Management, 1999, vol. 26, issue 3, 209-229
Abstract:
In the course of the last two decades Korean shipping has emerged as a major player in the liner market. In 1970 there was not a single container ship in the Korean fleet; yet, within the next two decades, shipping companies from Korea have become included among the top 10 liner operators in the world, in the context of a spectacular ascent of Asian companies in international container shipping. During the same period the organization of liner shipping itself underwent major changes. In the 1970s and 1980s, pools and powerful consortia prevailed, maximizing frequency and optimizing fleet deployment under pressure from the high investment entailed by containerization. The era of consortia, however, came to a close in the early 1990s; intermodalism and the expansion of the major liner companies into forward and backward segments of the transport chain rendered them inflexible for pursuing individual strategies of product diversification with a view to larger market shares. Global alliances were finally born as a result of a major reshuffling of co-operation agreements and of the globalization of the production process on the demand side. The aim of this paper is to follow and assess the options available to an aggressive low-cost national fleet in its journey to competitive maturity through a period of changing organization of liner shipping, focusing on the course of the leading Korean container company, and one of the largest in the world today, Hanjin. It highlights at the same time both the deep structural changes which liner shipping has undergone in the last two decades and the effects of current changes, such as the recent wave of mergers in this sector.
Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/030888399286853 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:marpmg:v:26:y:1999:i:3:p:209-229
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TMPM20
DOI: 10.1080/030888399286853
Access Statistics for this article
Maritime Policy & Management is currently edited by Dr Kevin Li and Heather Leggate McLaughlin
More articles in Maritime Policy & Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().