O Indústria de envio de contêineres possui uma cadeia de valor altamente fragmentada, marcada pela complexidade, excesso de capacidade e retornos baixos. No "lado marítimo" do transporte de contêineres, a cadeia de valor do setor compreende cinco segmentos principais: corretores, financiadores, proprietários, construtores e operadoras. Cada segmento é altamente fragmentado, com muitas empresas competindo por participação de mercado e excesso de capacidade em todos os lugares. Por exemplo, em toda a cadeia, a maioria das empresas líderes comanda participação de mercado de apenas 10 a 15 %, enquanto em cada segmento as dez principais empresas representam cumulativamente por menos de 50 % da participação de mercado. Desde o início de 2012, o retorno total dos acionistas (TSR) para todos os segmentos da cadeia de valor do setor teve um desempenho inferior ao MSCI World Industrials Index.
This dangerous combination of fragmentation and overcapacity has fueled a downward spiral that has decreased earnings and, thus, shareholder value. Since early 2012, total shareholder return (TSR) for all segments in the industry’s value chain has underperformed the MSCI World Industrials Index.
Destabilizing Change in the Industry
What can explain these disappointing figures? In part, most of this industry’s segments are experiencing destabilizing change.
- Financiamento de navios. Some large, traditional European banks started to withdraw support from the industry following the demise of Germany’s KG system and ship owners’ loan defaults resulting from TC rates for some vessel classes that were near operating-expense levels.
2 2 O sistema de KG na Alemanha consistia anteriormente em 1.600 Kommanditgesellschaft - ou kg - fundindo fundos. Ainda assim, estamos vendo uma ordem contínua de nova tonelagem financiada por fontes alternativas, como bancos asiáticos e investidores financeiros. Assim, a indústria de construção naval tem um incentivo para empurrar a tonelagem no mercado. 3 - Shipbuilding. The year 2014 saw shipyard utilization of only 65 percent, owing to a tenfold increase in shipbuilding capacity from 2002 through 2012, particularly in China. Thus, the shipbuilding industry has an incentive to push tonnage into the market. 3
- Propriedade do navio. Além disso, as redelvias das transportadoras de tonelagem fretada colocam uma parte cada vez maior da carga de capacidade de inatividade nos ombros dos proprietários. Many vessel owners continue to struggle with the new normal of low TC rates. Moreover, carriers’ redeliveries of chartered tonnage place an increasingly large portion of the idle-capacity burden on owners’ shoulders.
- portadores. O setor está preso em um ciclo vicioso: para sobreviver à pressão descendente que a excesso de capacidade impôs aos preços, as transportadoras buscam reduzir os custos de slot, adquirindo novos navios e mais eficientes. O influxo líquido gera uma capacidade excessiva e reduz ainda mais a utilização de embarcações, colocando ainda mais a pressão descendente sobre os preços. Muitas forças estão dirigindo esse ciclo, e os revestimentos individuais podem abordar apenas alguns deles. (Veja o Anexo 2.) Many midsize carriers have negative operating margins as a result of low and volatile freight rates and poor operational performance. The industry is entrapped in a vicious cycle: to survive downward pressure that overcapacity has imposed on prices, carriers seek to lower slot costs by acquiring new, larger, and more efficient vessels. The net influx spawns further overcapacity and lowers vessel utilization, putting even more downward pressure on prices. Many forces are driving this cycle, and individual liners can address only a few of them. (See Exhibit 2.)
Scale Leader or Niche Specialist: The Key to Profitability
Since 2011, the container-shipping industry has lifted its overall profitability curve from a level at which very few carriers broke even to one at which some are able to post profits and register a return on the cost of capital employed. However, most carriers remain unprofitable. The handful of carriers that have managed to record a profit have maintained a laser-sharp focus on operational improvements in response to persistently decreasing freight rates. Disciplined network rationalization and cost-reduction programs—along with an increase in average vessel size aimed at lowering unit slot costs—have improved these companies’ earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margins.
The two carrier types that have fared best are global deep-sea-scale leaders and niche-focused specialists. (See Exhibit 3.) The rest—midsize carriers—remain stuck in the middle, trapped between those two extremes.
Global deep-sea-scale leaders (with annual revenues ranging from $15 billion to $30 billion) leverage economies of scale to minimize slot costs, recording operating margins of about 5 percent in recent years. In 2014, however, some of these companies extracted more value from their scale, lifting their operating margins closer to 10 percent.
At the other extreme in terms of size, some niche-focused specialists have developed a sustainable competitive advantage in a specific region. For instance, many differentiate themselves by adopting an operating model that is specifically tuned to local needs. Although they bring in lower revenues than the global-scale leaders, the leaders in this group typically boast operating margins of 5 to 10 percent, thanks to their niche advantage.
Although we expect overall financial results for 2014 and the first quarter of 2015 to improve owing to rapidly falling bunker prices, carriers would be wise to view the improvement as a one-off event. Our analysis shows that because of overcapacity in the market and calculations used for bunker adjustment factor (BAF) surcharges, carriers will pass a big chunk of their fuel-cost savings on to customers, albeit with a two-month lag time (subject to individual carriers’ application of surcharges, pricing practices, and contracts). Hence, this will be a temporary profit windfall that will erode quickly, and it could give unwary carriers a false sense of sustainable profitability.
In covering their estimated cost of capital, most carriers face an uphill battle. (See Exhibit 4.) Indeed, over the past 15 years, their return on net assets (RONA) has been only about 3 percent. This is well below the 9 percent RONA of the S&P 500 for the same period, and it falls far short of covering the roughly 7 percent cost of capital needed to finance the assets deployed. Hence, not only have these carriers returned substantially less than companies in other industries, they have also destroyed significant value over a lengthy period.
Lifting Profitability: A Two-Step Approach
To lift their profitability, global carriers will need to adopt a two-step approach. (See Exhibit 5.) First, they will have to transform themselves internally by making the following moves:
- Extracting more value in the short term from commonly used cost- and revenue-improvement levers
- Defining a winning business model that spells out a clear and compelling value proposition, delivering on their value proposition by building the right operating model, and pursuing “next frontier” cost and revenue levers that can help them sharpen their competitive edge—and keep it sharp
- == Importar uma organização relatória e mais plana, simplificando as camadas e definindo os estabelecimentos de controle para o controle para o gerente para o gerente para o gerente e o gerente mais plano e mais ápo. e definir as metas corretas
Segundo, as operadoras que desejam continuar nos negócios globais em escala profunda precisarão criar a escala necessária, desbloqueando todo o potencial de sinergia de suas alianças ou buscando fusões e aquisições. Muitas operadoras não implementaram efetivamente todos os aspectos de seus acordos de aliança existentes, e essas alianças estão sacrificando um valor considerável. Alianças mais sofisticadas podem ajudar as transportadoras a capturar esse valor, alcançando mais sinergias através de movimentos como compras conjuntas estendidas, operações conjuntas e agrupamento de equipamentos. A longo prazo, as transportadoras também poderiam buscar escritórios conjuntos ou centros de serviço compartilhado, bem como desenvolvimento conjunto de TI, para criar valor adicional.
Adopting more sophisticated alliance models would enable carriers to achieve an additional 2- to 3-percentage-point improvement in their operating margins, with further potential increases if they execute a full merger
These possibilities provide a light at the end of the tunnel for the many carriers stuck in the middle. However, to achieve such gains, carriers will have to stretch themselves to reach far beyond their current practices.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Dinesh Khanna, Seungwook Oh, Byung Nam Rhee, Tomer Tzur, Jesper Præstensgaard, Jihoon Kang, Mads Peter Langhorn, Sanjaya Mohottala, Yossi Arouch, Rüdiger Wolf, Mathias Thomsen, David Stone, Alexander Rasmussen, Johannes Schlingmeier, Johannes von Dungen, Iulia Tarata, Jonas Lorentzen, Dorota Korenkiewicz, Dustin Klimczak, Robert-Alexander Koch, and the team members of BCG’s Shipping Benchmarking Initiative.
