Intra-Asia Container Trades

Asian trade (excluding the Mid-East, Indian subcontinent and Australasia) amounted to 28.6 million teu in 2007, accounting for one fifth of total global trade.

This excludes any business moving within its confines on a feeder basis which are bound for markets such as Europe, the US and South America. With China acting as a regional resource centre and with new free-trade deals emerging, there seems little doubt that the intra-Asian trades will continue to grow at a robust pace in the short to mid-term. This volume is forecasted to reach 50.7 million teu by 2013. Within the intra-Asian operating arena, niche, regional and global operators co-exist by operating ships as small as 150 teu up to 4,000 teu or more, and with divergent commercial strategies. On the core east/west trade lanes, business practice is by and large fairly similar and shippers have much less product differentiation to choose from other than “personalised service”. In intra-Asia, local players such as Temas Line and Winland Shipping compete with pan-regional operators such as Regional Container Lines and Samudera as well as global carriers like K Line and Yang Ming. A couple of clear trends have emerged in recent years. Regional players have expanded into the deepsea markets and larger vessels have been deployed on the core China/ASEAN axis. Both developments have arisen as a result of a number of global ocean carriers launching more of their own intra-Asian services in order to primarily cater for their feeder requirements.
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