“Non-Regular Shippers”: An Alternative Service to Diminish the Empty Container Traffic, a First and Comparative Approach to the “Rotterdam” and “Le Havre” Port Cases

Today, empty container traffic is an explosive phenomenon in ports, which provoke high transport capacities. In this paper, some countries that regularly have container sea links with “Rotterdam” and “Le Havre” were compared in function of both their empty container traffic evolution and their economic environment. A new service called “non-regular shippers” is proposed as a possible alternative, to profit empty container traffic. Comparison might allow us to understand the connection between the world’s empty container traffic, containers port’s rank and the general economic environment in the countries linked with both ports. The criterion to measure the port’s empty traffic evolution is a basic and concrete rate called ECTER which allows us to establish an appropriate comparison between ports and to define the empty container tendencies to each one. A systematic analysis is introduced in this study to identifying 48 countries linked to each port, based on the technique of standardized principal components analysis. Principal components allow us to clarify the mutual influences and to compare it between partner countries of both ports, and to identify some partner’s countries with the potential to develop the proposed “non-regular shippers” service.