Taking maritime shipping agreements out of the box

Since its beginnings in the 19th century, the liner shipping industry has shown specific peculiarities characterized by close collaboration between sea carriers. This cooperation has materialized through various types of inter-firm agreements that have been exempted from the key principles of competition law. Recently, strong criticism has emerged against strategic alliances and related agreements that rule a concentrated market where operators are strongly interrelated and increasingly integrated. However, the maritime management literature so far has given little attention to the concrete provisions of these agreements, which still appear as ‘black boxes.’ To fill this gap, we collected 61 enforced cooperative agreements registered with the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission from 1973 to 2020 using a three-way comparison through legal, linguistic, and business lenses of the differences between older and newer types of agreements. We underline the key temporal evolutions of these contracts and show how ocean carriers have incorporated new legal constraints and strategic needs driven by structural market changes toward greater logistics integration.