The Layout Strategy Of Launching Far East/Gulf Of Mexico Container Service

The quality of the service lines attaches great importance to the competiveness, customer support and profit for a container shipping company. To launch a competitive service loop at a right time is a key path to expanding the business scale, as well as increasing market share and consolidation of the industry leadership. Owing to the huge investment of launching a new service, the fierce competition between shipping companies and changeable shipping situation, the comprehensive analysis and determination should be done to make the policy-making accurate and scientific.The paper begins with the characteristics of container shipping market and the current situation and the trend of the international container shipping market. As the scale advantage is increasingly to expand, the market shows no sign of improvement under the strong supply pressure, which has challenged the service planning. With reference to Porter’s three generic competitive Strategies, this paper selects the competitive strategy to be adopted in the service planning and choose the Far East/Gulf of Mexico line of the Company Z as the example. Through cargo demand forecast which is derived from linear regression and seasonal index model, internal and external environment analysis, both the opportunity and challenge the Company Z is to be faced with are clearly known. The new service planning project is to be carried out according to the planning principle, procedure and method. The final best result will be attained out of all choices by defining the objective function of the minimum net cost per slot.International shipping layout planning is a complicated project involving organic combination of both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The paper ends with the assessment of trade lanes’ performance, along with calculation of break-even point and the laid-up point, providing the foundation of the dynamic management of the shipping.