One of the more complex business sectors and interesting is that of maritime transportation. This industry has pioneered advances in logistics that have made the world smaller, contributing decisively to making international trade more efficient, reduce costs, enhance competitiveness and generate wealth.
An example of the fundamental contributions of maritime transportation is the use of container. It is estimated that there are perhaps up to 300 million of these “boxes” in ports and roads around the world. These were used for the first time in 1956 when someone had used box trailers to which they removed the wheels and their use, to “contain” bulk and simply allow mounting the box in another trailer in the port target, struck the times of loading and unloading of vessels dramatically. Today, they are fully integrated into the supply chain.
An important part of Asian economic development has come from his great ability to trade, underpinned by the large capacity of its ports to handle cargo. The ports of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Ningbo can handle-every one-hundred million tons of cargo annually. Moreover, developments in recent decades of maritime transportation has been given to larger vessels, usually made in Korean yards, which allow greater economies of scale.
The Korean ship MSC Daniela or Emma Maersk, a Danish ship, have a length of 400 meters and has a capacity of 14 000 TEU’s1. This means that could lead, on a trip and a half million color TVs of 29 inches, or 60 million phones. Most impressive is that, given its high-tech automation and can be operated with a crew of only thirteen people. Economies of scale are achieved and it would be more expensive to ship a container by land a hundred miles from China to send him to Europe on a boat with these features. There are already plans to build a Korean ship with 22 thousand TEU capacity.
The development of vessels of this magnitude has resulted in the ports have to make large investments to adapt to meet them, loading and unloading. The adaptation of the storage infrastructure and roads around the port has not been lower. The same Panama Canal is in the process of expansion to allow the passage of more ships and larger.
Considering the rapid growth of international trade in recent years, it has been one of the sectors most heavily invested.
