The Performance of Seaport Clusters - RePub - Erasmus Universiteit ...

Chapter 11 – Governance and Performance in Seaport Clusters; Results of the Cases 141
The importance attributed to various intermediaries differs strongly between experts. Various
experts associate intermediaries with ‘traditional’ middleman whose importance is slowly
reduced. The differences of responses of experts with a long experience in the port industry,
versus experts with a short experience are given in Table 52. This shows that opinions
about the importance of intermediaries change.
Table 52: The intermediary ranking of two ‘experience cohorts’
Intermediary Average ranking by experts with a
‘short’ experience
Average ranking by experts with a
‘long’ experience
Agent 3.2 2.7
Forwarder 2.1 2.5
Shipbroker 4.2 4.0
Trader 3.7 4.6
Associations 3.9 3.4
Non asset owning LSP 3.5 3.7
Scale of 1 (most important) to 6 (least important)
These differences, even though not statistically significant, reveal something also observed
in the open interviews; relative newcomers attribute less importance to the presence of ship
related intermediaries (ship agents and shipbrokers) and more importance to cargo related
intermediaries (forwarders, traders and non asset owning LSP’s). This can be explained as
shipping becomes more and more ‘commodified’: the product becomes more homogeneous,
and is purchased more and more electronically. As a consequence, the importance of ship
related intermediaries declines vis-à-vis cargo related intermediaries. The survey results
provide ‘circumstantial evidence’ that in Rotterdam shipping is more ‘commodified’ than in
the two other ports: experts rank ship related intermediaries as relatively unimportant.
The experts acknowledge the role of intermediaries as important sources of knowledge.
‘Dedicated’ knowledge intermediaries have not emerged in seaports; especially forwarders
are mentioned as intermediaries that possess and distribute knowledge.