Study Of The Selection Of A Hub Port For The West Coast Of Africa

Globalization of world economy,containerization,privatization of port industry and substantial economic growth in Africa have significantly intensified the competition between ports.This has led to an international production and restructuration of maritime transport of container ports as nodes in international supply chain.Technology development and time critical global production patterns of ports are confronted with rising expectations on the performance of their sea and land side operation as well as on the seamless distribution of goods to the hinterland.Nowadays,hinterlands have become more shared due to better efficiency of ports and increasing hinterland connectivity facilitated by containerization and multimodalism.This dissertation assesses and analyze ports performance to determine port efficiency in the West Coast of Africa with the purpose to make a better choice of a selection of a hub port in the region.For many years,efficiency in of ports have been used to analyze and improve operations by minimizing resources for productions.This has fueled port growth and massive and massive investment in port related activities.Due to a recent growth noted in demand of containers and importance of reducing the cost and the lean time,shipping lines companies were led to operate direct lines to the region in order to meet economy of scale and also improve the logistics operations in the region.Therefore,the setting of an international hub port is becoming very important.This research analyzes 10 selected ports out of 38 to be compared through our study based on their efficiency score.It also provide an overview of the methodology that can be used to evaluate a selection of port as a hub port and pinpoints the area of applicability of such techniques in relation of their pros and cons.The author,to fulfill this research has gathered data by Books,journals,ports annual reviews,information via internet,also interviews were conducted via phone to collect unavailable data online.DEA frontier of Dr.JOE ZHU were used in our research to benchmark the efficiency of such ports while the port performance indicators are used to provide a profound analysis of the selection of a suitable candidate to becoming the hub port in the region studied.After computation of our DEA window analysis and discussion,Pointe-Noire have been selected as the best candidate to become the international hub port in the West Coast of Africa.