(Detailed PDF Map)
Source: adapted from Drewry Shipping Consultants.

World's Main Intermediate Hubs and Markets, 2007-09

With the growth of long distance containerized trade, intermediate hubs grew in importance in helping connect different systems of maritime circulation. They tend to be located along the main circum-equatorial maritime route that goes through Panama, the Strait of Malacca, Suez and Gibraltar and that links the world's major markets. Many also provide a relay function between the north-south and the east-west shipping lanes. The world's most important intermediate hub is Singapore where 85% of the traffic is transshipment, which accounted for more than 25.9 million TEUs in 2009.

The emergence of major intermediate hubs favored a concentration of large vessels along long distance high capacity routes while lesser ports can be serviced with lower capacity ships. Economies of scale over long distances are thus reinforced. The emergence of intermediate hubs permitted liner services that would otherwise be economically unfeasible. However, there is a limit to the hub-and-spoke network configuration and consequently also to the size of the vessels being deployed on the trunk routes.

Transshipment incidence is the share of the total port throughput that is "ship to ship", implying that the final destination of the container is another port. The higher it is, the more a port can be considered as a transshipment hub and an incidence above 80% places the port as a "pure" transshipment hub. There are seven major transshipment markets accounting for the bulk of the transshipment activity. They are referred as markets since transshipment is an activity that is not tied to a specific port, unlike gateway traffic linked with inland freight distribution. Therefore, transshipment hubs compete for the traffic related to a region / market.

Geography plays an important role in the setting of a transshipment market, which is often at the crossroads of north / south shipping routes and where there is a bottleneck. Singapore is such a case where the major Asia - Europe shipping lanes are constrained to pass through the Strait of Malacca. There can be also a shift in the transshipment dynamics due to the changing commercial  environment. For instance, transshipment incidence levels in the Japanese ports of Tokyo and Yokohama used to be in the 20% range, but have declined to less than 10%. The Mediterranean has only two points of entry (Suez and Gibraltar), both of which have significant transshipment activity, as well as ports that are at the center of the basin (e.g. Marsalokk and Gioa Tauro). Although the Caribbean have a large exposure on the Atlantic side, it has one outlet for the Pacific; the Panama Canal which has significant transshipment activities both on the Atlantic and Pacific sides. The North Sea and the Baltic are another transshipment market, but of lower incidence since the Baltic generates more limited freight volumes.