Analysis and future outlook of intra-Asia shipping

Abstract

Benefited from the fast developing economy, the container shipping market in Asia is steadily growing these years. The intra-Asia trade has become the world’s largest container shipping market. One out of four containers is on the intra-Asia trades and the share is still increasing. In 2017, the world’s top 10 busiest containers ports are all from Asia. It is estimated that in 2018 the intra-Asia container trade volume will exceed 30 million TEUs.

Since the economy of Asia is growing fast, there are various opportunies and potential for the container shipping as a demanding industry. Therefore, this report aims to analyse the current shipping market and anticipate the future outlook of intra-Asia container shipping market. At first, the extensive literature review and research were carried out to have an comprehensive understanding of current shipping market. The driving forces for container trade are economic growth in Asia, regional integration and trade liberalization. The trade pattern is predicted through commodity demand and supply, government policies and infrastructure and facility development. In order to get a better analysis of future outlook, industry experts opinions were collected through questionnaires using Delphi Technique.

Finally, by combining the literature review and questionnaire results, this report examines the findings and discussed about the opportunities, threats, uncertainties, future outlook and recommendations for ship-owners and operators. For opportunities, the development of e-commerce will increase the demand and the application of Blockchain will make a difference for the whole industry. The threat will still be the piracy which needs to take more care of. The political policy will bring uncertainty to the market. At last, the future outlook and recommendations are shown to give different stakeholders a better reference and understanding of Asia market.