speeds. Cyclical collapses in the price of oil slow down tramp tankers, which await small increases in oil prices before delivering their cargo. More recently, shipping companies have been commissioning ships designed for slow-steaming and are even reverting to using a high-tech form of sail to deploy wind power for their ships and save on fuelling costs.48 Whether companies that deliberately slow down their ships in order to secure small savings will be willing to pay the exorbitant – and mushrooming – fees for crossing the canal remains to be seen.
They are the conquerors of the world
Seeking a personal chemical fortune;
Sports and comfort travel with them;
They take the education
Of races, classes, and animals, on this Boat.
Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Motion’
In the summer of 2017, only one day after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and their allies declared a blockade against Qatar, the largest shipping company in the world, Copenhagen-based Maersk, announced that it was rerouting containers intended for Qatar, delivering them via a new feeder service from the port of Salalah in Oman instead of the original transhipment port, Jabal Ali in Dubai.49 Eventually, Qatar shifted its transhipment hub from Jabal Ali to the Omani port of Sohar, which is much closer than Salalah. Maersk could accomplish this nimble manoeuvre because, like many of the world’s major shipping companies, it has close relations with a terminal-management company. Maersk and APM Terminals are both owned by AP Moller-Maersk. APM Terminals (APMT), the third-largest terminal operator in the world, manages the container terminals at the Salalah port. Sohar’s container terminals are managed by Hong Kong–based Hutchison, which is the second-largest in the world (after Singapore-based PSA International). Jabal Ali is managed by Dubai Ports World (DP World), the fourth-largest terminal operator in the world.50
These terminal-management arrangements can be crucial in deciding shipping routes, since a Maersk ship is more likely to unload its goods at an APMT-managed terminal close to its cargo’s final destination. Special arrangements between other large shipping companies and specific terminal operators that are not co-subsidiaries can also similarly influence shipping routes and destinations.
The world’s third-largest shipping company, CMA CGM, is based in Marseille, France; I travelled on its freighters between Malta and Dubai. The company is owned by the Lebanese-French Saadé family, who hail from Latakia in Syria. Escaping the Lebanese civil war in 1977, Jacques Saadé and his brother Johnny (who later left the firm) founded Compagnie Maritime d’Affrètement (CMA) in Marseille in 1978 to ferry wheeled vehicles on ‘ro/ro’ ships between Marseille and Beirut.51 In 1996, the French government offered to privatise the state-owned shipping firm, Compagnie Générale Maritime (CGM), which had been established in the mid-nineteenth century and whose early success had depended on the mail subsidies it had received from the government. Saadé’s CMA bought CGM, and his CMA CGM was born. In the aftermath of its founding, the company aggressively acquired smaller shipping lines in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and forged alliances with terminal operators throughout these regions.
CMA CGM today operates in an alliance with two other shipping companies, China Shipping Container Lines (headquartered in Shanghai, China) and United Arab Shipping Company (based in the UAE, though partially owned by investment vehicles of the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia).52 The alliance gives the companies access to one another’s ports, shipping arrangements, and routes and has changed each company’s steaming schedules, their destination ports, and the frequency of travel along some routes. CMA CGM’s dominance in the Middle Eastern and African markets also means that it has longstanding arrangements with terminal operators there, foremost among them DP World. CMA CGM ships are therefore more likely to take on or unload cargo at terminals operated by DP World (rather than, say, APMT).
These alliances between shipping companies and agreements between them and terminal operators translate into discounted port fees, preferential treatment at arrival and loading or unloading, and lower freight costs for the shipping companies. Should they be able to secure such agreements with shipping companies, some ports or terminals expand at the expense of neighbouring ports. In return for these lucrative deals, the ports must accommodate the shipping companies’ hunger for ever larger ships. I will write more about this effect in the next chapter.
| Container terminal operator | Headquarters | Relations with shipping companies |
| COSCO Shipping Ports | Hong Kong | The company has become the largest container terminal operator after the merger of COSCO and China Shipping companies |
| Hutchison Ports | Hong Kong (but incorporated in the British Virgin Islands) | |
| PSA International | Singapore | Has an alliance with COSCO |
| DP World | Dubai | Partners with many shipping companies, including CMA CGM and UASC |
| China Merchant Port Holdings | Hong Kong | |
| APM Terminals | Netherlands | APM Terminals’ parent organisation is Maersk (whose shipping company of the same name is the largest in the world) |
| Yılport | Turkey | Owned by the Yıldırım Group which has long had mutual investment agreements with CMA CGM |
| Shanghai International Port Groups | China | Has partnered with COSCO |
| International Container Terminal Services | Philippines | |
| Terminal Investment Ltd | Netherlands | MSC (based in Italy) |
Table 1.2 – The world’s largest container terminal operators53
Sea routes are constantly reimagined to accommodate geopolitical realignments, corporate alliances, and shifting calculations about ship sizes, route expediencies, and maritime power plays. Another set of ephemeral assumptions and imaginaries, often invented far from the ports themselves, also influences the making and unmaking of these oceanic highways: how routes are priced. Once they are priced, these price indices form the basis of speculations that in turn affect the underlying prices.
Freight rates have historically been crucial components of how shipping routes were devised, traversed, and imagined. As they change, so do the fortunes of maritime countries. Between 1820 and 1913, freight rates plummeted by a factor of four, just as the volume of merchant shipping within and across empires quintupled.54 The primary beneficiaries of the decline in freight rates in the nineteenth century were Great Britain and other Western European countries. Because they imported foodstuffs and raw materials – bulky materials – in very large volumes, they profited from the ever cheaper maritime freight costs. Further, the ships that had imported such goods backhauled manufactured goods rather than travelling back in ballast, and therefore encouraged the expansion of markets for European goods.55 Freight rates fell in part due to technological innovations in shipbuilding and navigation, as well as improvements in port facilities over the course of the nineteenth century. But freight rates were also significantly influenced by such factors as ‘monopoly or collusion, navigation laws, the relationship between inward and outward cargoes on a route, and so forth’.56
Around
