This is to study about strategy of Global shipping liners to overcome the global recession these days. Due to economic crisis triggered by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s moratorium in 2008, global economy had been recessed and no one could see when overall economy would be emerged out of the recession.
However it had been recovered gradually afterward and it seemed that global economy was getting out of the dark depression completely in 2010. Even though such recovery was derived from stimulative economic policy not by the rule from the market economy, but most shipping companies did not realize that interval of economic depression and booming was getting shorten than what it used be. And this finally leaded all shipping companies to wrong economic prospects and made them invest the revenue from the recovery for ordering new ships or chartering the bigger vessels again to increase the market share.
However global economy was back to recession again in 2011 after short break. And as ordered vessels were newly inputted into the market, global capacity was being supplied overly than demand. And it made the shipping rate down severely. Moreover Bunker oil price had been soared unexpected by about 40% early in 2012 compared to 2009 so all shipping companies got seriously damaged ever.
During this economic slump, some recovery plans have been emerged by some global shipping companies in various aspects to save the operational variable cost. Maersk Line has implemented 2 main projects to overcome the economic slump. One is called as On-time Delivery strategy and another is Triple-E strategy. Triple-E strategy is to order 18,000TEU vessel with state-of-the-art technology to save the variable cost. This bread new vessel is known for 'Economy of Scale', 'Energy Efficiency' and 'Environmentally improved'. And for On-time Delivery strategy, that is to provide the high schedule reliability to the customers to get rid of spending extra cost due to uncertainty on shipping delivery. There are 2 sub-strategies to support OTD. One is called as Terminal Partnering Project(TPP) and another is Product differentiation project which would be developed to Daily Maersk later. Especially introduction of Daliy Maersk in Sep, 2011 brought huge response from the market and other companies in various aspects. This service was devised from concept of 'Conveyor belts'. So Maersk started to input over 70 vessels that are over 10,000TEU into the existing 7 services between Asia-Europe and provide daily cut-off time to the customer. And also Maersk ensured fixed transportation time to Customer on these fixed services. So customer can benefit from using this service in terms of Predictable and Flexible SCM. Maersk intended to not only save the operational expense but also create new sales opportunity to increase the revenue by selling this new concept of service to the customers. So this can be drawn much attention from other shipping companies, freight forwarders, customers and etc.
Therefore the aim of this Study is as below.
Firstly, observe the current global economic situation and shipping industry. And then investigate how these 2 are connected relatively.
Secondly, review and estimate the actual strategies being carried by the shipping companies to overcome the recession.
Finally had studied how Daily Maersk implementation could effect to their main strategy, OTD and evaluate the outcome with actual OTD data before/after Daily Maersk's implementation.
Hope this study can be helpful for those who is trying to come up with ideas to overcome the global economic recession.