Abstract
Tonnage supply of the liner shipping industry is highly concentrated and continuously growing. Carriers provide ship capacities by various fleet composition strategies for coping with their service networks. This paper explores the similarity of fleet supply among the top 20 global liner carriers in terms of data gathered at the beginning of 2008. A scatter analysis is applied to simply show the difference in two-dimensional elements. This research also attempts to group these carriers with cluster analysis by appending more attributes concerned with fleet composition. Results reveal that MSC, Evergreen, COSCO, CSCL, and Yang Ming always form a firm cluster with using larger ships and keeping relatively aged fleet. CMA CGM, Hamburg Süd, and ZIM have higher ratios on capacities contributed from medium size ships. Except PIL and Wan Hai operating smaller size of ships on their service scopes, other carriers own more large-sized and younger ship fleet. Their decision depends somewhat on the steps of alliance partners.
Recommended Citation
Lu, Hua-An
(2012)
"A GROUPING ANALYSIS FOR THE SIMILARITY OF SHIP FLEET COMPOSITION AMONG LEADING CONTAINER CARRIERS,"
Journal of Marine Science and Technology: Vol. 20:
Iss.
5, Article 10.
DOI: 10.6119/JMST-011-0512-1
Available at:
https://jmstt.ntou.edu.tw/journal/vol20/iss5/10