동북아지역 최적 피더선형에 관한 연구

Abstract

The growth of the global economy, driven by the strong performance of Asian countries, especially China, has given rise to an increase of the world container volume. Major container shipping liners have ordered large container vessels to minimize unit shipping cost through economies of scale. In the era of global financial/economic crisis, however, shipping companies face difficulties to deploy proper-sized vessels due to demand fluctuations. They intended to replace existing container vessels with bigger vessels before the crisis. Currently however, they adjust shipping schedules and re-deploy their existing vessels to cope with demand decreases.

The aim of this thesis is to address the issue of the optimal feeder ship size in Northeast Asia, a topic which has been overlooked in the academic literature. It is, however, worthwhile to analyze feeder ship size in a hub port feeder network, because relatively few studies have been devoted to an analytic, detailed examination of feeder container liner services. This study analyzes the optimal feeder ship size for Pusan port, a hub port in Northeast Asia, dominated by transshipment, from a feeder ship operator’s perspective. Factual information such container liner schedules, chartering rate and nautical distance between ports has been collected by the author and a number of model assumptions are made to construct an analytical model for analyzing optimal feeder ship size inspired by Ng and Kee (2008).

The analysis shows that the optimal ship size for the Qingdao, Dalian, Shanghai and Tianjin ports are 744 TEU, 963 TEU, 655 TEU and 655 TEU respectively, while the currently deployed average ship size for the Qingdao, Dalian, Shanghai and Tianjin ports are 615 TEU, 611 TEU, 756 TEU and 703 TEU respectively. For Hakata, Osaka, Yokohama and Tokyo feeder ship sizes of 342 TEU, 702 TEU, 700 TEU and 588 TEU seem more appropriate. The current average ship size for the Hakata, Osaka, Yokohama and Tokyo are 329 TEU, 387 TEU, 449 TEU and 523 TEU respectively. Finally, the findings of this paper confirm that every port has its own optimal size of feeder ships and ship capacity differences remains between currently deployed vessels and optimally sized ships. It seems that ship operators need to consider a vessel fleet replacement with large vessels to operate at the lowest possible unit cost.