Dynamic role of actors in freight transport and logistics

Over the last decades, international trade via sea has increased continuously and massively. As a consequence, shipments of commodities have expanded and changed: the volumes of cargo carried by the specialised bulk fleets have been gradually eroded by the growing competition of global container operators. It turns out that container stakeholders have attracted the majority of the cargo flows since they work together in various forms. This strategy is based on synergies, improving returns to scale and scope. The increasing trade of goods and the containerisation have generated new problems to solve for the global system of transportation. Not only maritime actors, but also ports have changed their role as nodes in a global network, allowing the interconnection between the foreland with the hinterland. Currently there are emerging association structures even in the hinterland transportation system. Indeed, demand of global transport is located in hinterlands turning this environment highly competitive. The historical development of strategic forms of collaborations has been observed at the maritime and port side. They emerged due to economic and logistics advantages. These advantages become more important whenever many modes, many actors and many network components provide similar services. Contrarily to the main stream in global trade, the transport and logistics chain of bananas seems to develop contrarily. These flows are still opposing to the main trend caused by the phenomenon of containerisation. However, also the association of actors has always being present in the banana trade. In this case, stakeholders are interested in still receiving the benefits of the banana trade. The main finding is that the market power is owned by the multi-nationals who continue to be integrated and control the whole supply chain. That is why the supply providers have started to collaborate and to associate also in different forms in order to grab a part of the market power located at the demand side. The reason is simple, there is a slight difference in prices and a simple cost calculation can be done for revealing the economic benefits and to show the market power of every actor involved. In order to investigate the role of actors in freight and transportation and its main dynamics, this paper has been divided into four sections. An overview of the collaboration forms in the shipping industry considering the main actors and their strategies been provided in section two. The third section is focused on the income that every actor involved in the banana cold chain receives, and a real case illustrates the costs for transporting a reefer container and a bulk reefer. Results show that a coordination of supply actors enforces competition between both ways for shipping reefer products. Finally, in section four some conclusions are drawn on the complete analysis, mainly concerning economic aspects of association structures among global actors