The international maritime shipping industry has undergone considerable changes in recent years—some are driven internally by factors such as mergers and acquisitions within the industry, while others are impacted by external forces like the application of Internet technologies. Since institutional investors began focusing on investments in the international maritime logistics sector in 2014, many start-ups have dedicated themselves to this field, bringing tangible and significant changes to the industry. These changes mainly include the following aspects:
scales of top-tier shipping lines and concentrated shipping capacity. Representative cases include the merger of COSCO Shipping and China Shipping, Maersk’s acquisition of Hamburg Süd, and the merger of three Japanese shipping lines to form ONE (Ocean Network Express). As the most important upstream suppliers in the logistics chain, this trend of concentration will also exert certain impacts on the business models of Internet-based logistics platforms.
The emergence of multiple freight rate platforms has reduced the occurrence of "unauthorized order diversions"—a practice that previously thrived on information asymmetry. This has rapidly compressed the hierarchical layers of offline supply chains and undermined the foundation of the original online transaction model, whose core driver was to secure lower freight rates for end customers by eliminating intermediate tiers.
Experience from numerous B2B industries shows that an online transaction model must deliver at least a 20-30% advantage over its offline counterpart in terms of cost or efficiency; otherwise, it will struggle to gain traction. The international maritime logistics industry also needs to explore other viable models.
The level of integration, aggregation, and openness of the industry’s basic information has improved rapidly. In March last year, Shanghai Port integrated its cargo information and made it accessible to the public; Ningbo Port completed the aggregation of its information even earlier than Shanghai Port; and nationwide truck positioning information was also fully integrated at the beginning of last year. The opening-up of business information by industry leaders—such as terminals and large shipping lines—plays a pivotal role in promoting transparency, standardization, and efficiency enhancement across the entire industry.
The rapid rise in labor costs and the prominent difficulty in recruitment over the past two years have led the industry to attach increasing importance to systemization and the interconnection between upstream and downstream links. Just as Foxconn has extensively promoted automation to replace its heavy reliance on manual labor, the international maritime logistics industry will also face drastic changes driven by systemization and intelligentization in the future.
