Seaports – their functions and market strategies
Large universal seaports currently perform three basic economic functions:
• transport, resulting from their very essence and character as transport hubs
• distribution and logistics, due to their location facilitating the development of this type of activity, which is associated with the creation and development of distribution and logistics centers and distriparks in the port area, accompanied by various transport and trade activities
• industrial, associated with the location of production and processing activities within their territory.
Due to the limited nature of their land, which is becoming a scarce commodity (and whose value successively increases with the dynamic development of their transport and handling functions), they make efforts to concentrate activities, mainly those that generate and ensure the highest possible added value for them. This is activity performed within the scope of their first function, and in particular the second, which they primarily strive to attract. To acquire it, and on an appropriate scale, it is not enough to offer only the appropriate handling and storage potential, a good layout of transport connections with the port’s hinterland and foreland, new serviced land, or to build or facilitate the creation of a logistics center or distribution and logistics centers.
Above all, actions must be taken to allow for the fullest possible integration of the port itself or selected port terminals (container, ro-ro) into the system of logistics supply chains created in land-sea relations. This usually requires a significant reorientation of the port’s existing activities and market strategy, and sometimes a restructuring of the existing seaport management model in order to better adapt it to logistics supply chain management concepts.
This is not an easy task, as most seaports whose management models and strategies were oriented solely towards the intra-port system are finding out. At best, they supported logistics forms of terminal management, facilitating its adaptation only to the requirements of the transport chain’s functioning in land-sea relations. They did not sufficiently favor the integration of these facilities with the system of logistics supply chains. In the global economic system, this hindered their adaptation to the conditions and requirements of highly competitive transport and commodity markets and thus isolated them to a significant extent from the market environment important to them.
Seaports in the system of global commodity and transport markets and logistics supply chains
Large port hubs function not only within the national, but above all, the international transport system. As a result, they are also an integral component of logistics supply chains, shaped in land-sea relations, integrating global transport markets with commodity markets (Figure 1). As shown in Figure 1, supply chains shaped in land-sea relations connect and integrate in a transport-trade sense, and increasingly also in a capital-organizational sense (so-called integrated logistics supply chain management), overseas centers of production and consumption, covering not only the commodity markets operating there, but also transport markets, including port and freight (shipping) markets, as well as logistics and other service markets existing in these functional-spatial systems (e.g., insurance, financial), as well as labor markets. Commodity markets generate primary demand, i.e., demand for goods that are the subject of transport in land-sea relations, within international supply chains. This, in turn, in order to be realized, generates demand for broadly understood transport and logistics services, which, as so-called induced demand, then has the character of secondary demand and is addressed to transport and logistics operators operating in the land and sea transport sector. This demand manifests itself as so-called effective demand in transport and logistics markets, including freight and port markets (which constitute an integral part of the goods circulation phase, and thus the supply chain – Figure 1). The efficiency of the functioning of other transport markets, as well as the commodity markets they serve, and consequently the efficiency of all processes within logistically managed supply chains of goods on a global scale, depends to a large extent on their efficient functioning, i.e., the efficiency of realizing secondary demand.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 5/2007.