THE COMPETITIVENESS OF PORT SAID PORT TRANSHIPMENT OF CONTAINER TRADE VIS-À-VIS MEDITERRANEAN REGION AND THE WORLD

Traditionally marine transportation was separated from the importance of the transportation supply chain logistics network, but in the early 2000s became a very important aspect of the entire logistics chain operation, i.e. an integral part of the bigger picture logistics and supply chain operation. Accordingly, the port was transformed from a monopolistic market to a competitive market which inherently forces the ports to compete to offer some profitable services for instant the transhipment of container trade and that carries the burdens of additional services for improvement at ports so that they can compete. The rapid growth of seaborne trade, container traffic keeps growing parallel with the increasing of ships size; therefore it became not economically feasible to ships to load and discharge in multiple ports. Hence, some of the ports began to grow until it became what is known as hub ports. This led to the development of new types of special container transhipment port, where the transhipment define as the act of shipping goods to an intermediate destination prior to reaching their ultimate end-use. Transhipment is a common practice with logistic benefits, but can be used to illegitimately to disguise the country of origin or intent of the Goods ("How to Import into the US," 2007). The world transhipment trade is divided into nine main regions almost covering the entire world (Russo & Musolino, 2013). Our study will focus on the competitiveness of the main hub ports in the Mediterranean region where the Mediterranean`s location connecting the trade between the Middle East, Asia and Africa ? and for some vessels, even USA east coast-means that regions hosts a great number of transhipment ports, a large numbers of ships calling in the Mediterranean are on the route to ports not necessarily to be their final destination for unloaded the cargo (Lloyd’s List, 2015), vis-à-vis port of Port Said whereas the port recorded a significant growth at the last years in parallel with the growth of transhipment trade in mega hubs in the Mediterranean region whereas recorded strong growth in container traffic in the recent years, recording growth well above the market average (Lloyd`s List, 2014) but at same time port Said port still so far from the Global competition. Our study will use SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis for understanding the weaknesses and strengths to identifying both opportunities and threats and analyse the logistics and marketing factors influencing the growth of Port Said port in order to make recommendations on how to maintain high rates of growth and to be a global leader as integrated logistics hub in the presence of competitive market in transhipment of container trade.