a possible market structures which may evolve naturally from the today existing structure or maybe there are other innovative companies who take this a step forward and try to reshape the industry to another form.

a possibility could be that the shipowning /operating business becomes separated from the container operating and marketing/sales of container transport.

This means that shipping companies operate vessels without containers, These will be only shipping platforms on which every company which own containers or which can hire containers can load their equipment on them.

When concentrating on the core business of ocean transport only, probably such shipping companies will run with a small shore overhead staff, with more traditional agency services and respectively will not have extensive sales/marketing activities. T4 they probably will sell/book space/slots only in large amounts of containers. Such companies will act invisible to the consumer /merchant

In this way the today ocean carriers could seperate from the ocean transport and concentrate on their forwarding arms with their marketing/sales together with their affiliated container management . Their status will change to something like NVOCC’s. From the other hand large forwarding companies could also purchase/hire equipment and more easily position themselves in a equal position to this carriers. Under such a new market constellation the function of global container hire companies would also change when they will start hire their equipment to various small/medium forwarders and/or to large imp/exp /trading companies who may prefer not to use intermediate services.

In parallel shipowners (not carriers) will establish an entity which will provide pure ocean services on some major trade lanes. Ships running on a service available to ship containers to more or less everybody.

I guess forwarding companies would not like this idea, since today they don’t have the burden of the container management/owning with relevant cost. But maybe carriers would like it since they get rid of the difficult finding optimal cost algorithm between container management and fleet management , re positioning equipment/unbalanced trades etc etc. From the other hand this will decrease the entrance barriers to the market, because one doesn’t need container s and an established marketing/sales system in order to offer ocean transport services, visa versa this can affect the forwarding market by establishing entrance barriers because of the need to own/hire containers