The Coevolutionary Process of Maritime Management of Shipping Industry in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Legal assessment of BIMCO's infectious or contagious diseases (IOCD) clauses for voyage and time charter parties

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the shipping industry is still severe, ranging from vessels being denied entrance to ports to crews on board ships being trapped for many months. To counter and regulate those emerging issues, the shipping industry presently incorporated into the charter parties the BIMCO's Disease Clause originated from the 2015 Ebola outbreak, the so-called BIMCO's Infectious or Contagious Diseases (IOCD) Clauses. While proved successful during the Ebola outbreak, those Clauses were inadequate to regulate a global pandemic such as Covid-19 effectively. Specifically, the IOCD Clauses, while they successfully establish the concepts of 'Disease' and 'Affected Area', fail with the allocation of liability, especially when the crew on board is affected by Covid-19 and the ship needs to deviate from course to change the crew. In that instance, the shipowner, provided that he exercised due diligence in proactively avoiding the infection of his crew, is excluded from liability. In contrast, it is deemed that the liability between shipowner and charterer should be at least shared. For voyage charter parties BIMCO's Infectious or Contagious Diseases Clause 2015, applied both to the Ebola and the Covid-19 outbreak, allocates the right of termination and the liability for deviations and excessive costs strictly to charterers. In contrast, for the time charter parties, BIMCO has imposed the 'BIMCO Infectious or Contagious Diseases Clause for Time Charter Parties 2022' amended presently. According to those regulations, the liability can and should be shared between charterers and ship owners. As a result, the shipowner is forced to exercise due diligence more effectively, especially when he is initially liable for the excessive costs.

Strategic Crisis Response of Shipping Industry in the Post COVID-19 Era: A Case of the Top 10 Shipping Lines

Shipping has played a pivotal role during the epidemic, ensuring that the global logistics functions without disruption. COVID-19 hit various industries around the world, and shipping was no exception. How the shipping industry responds to the crisis and simultaneously shoulders its respective responsibility in the world’s battling the crisis is thus worth exploring in depth. This study takes the top 10 global container shipping capacity liners, which account for 84.7% of the worldwide capacity, as research objects. A corpus for text analysis was constructed collecting press releases and advisories issued on official websites of these 10 container shipping companies from January 2020 to July 2021. Comparison studies were made horizontally among ten shipping companies and longitudinally for crisis evolution patterns into three sub-corpora of Pre/early-Crisis, Crisis-in-Progression, and Post-COVID-19-Era. Quantitative findings were explored and elaborated further under a comprehensive theoretical framework integrating crisis management and communication, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and maritime management (MM). The extracted positive and negative keywords revealed textual characteristics and emergency response strategies on the part of shipping lines in the Pre/early-Crisis, Crisis-in-Progression, and Post-COVID-19-Era. The inclusion of the themes of pursuing sustainability in the shipping lines’ responses to such worldwide crisis as COVID-19 is out of the common knowledge of crisis management but reveals the commitment and strategies on the part of the industry. The findings provide a reasonably comprehensive picture of the efforts made by large container shipping companies to respond to COVID-19 and the measures taken to soothe stakeholders. This paper extends and relearns crisis management, CSR, and MM theories through integrating the fulfilling of cooperate social responsibilities in maritime management as the cooperate crisis responses, thus proposing the integrity of the three topics. Moreover, management recommendations are provided for shipping company management, IMO, and port authorities.

Uncertainties in Liner Shipping and Ship Schedule Recovery: A State-of-the-Art Review

Each shipping line is expected to establish a reliable operating model, and the design of ship schedules is a key operational consideration. Long-term profits for shipping lines can be expected from a well-designed ship schedule. In today’s liner service design, managing the time factor is critical. Shipping schedules are prone to different unexpected disruptions. Such disruptions would necessitate a near-real-time analysis of port capacity and re-design of the original ship schedule to offset the negative externalities. Ship schedule recovery strategies should be implemented to mitigate the effects caused by disruptions at ports or at sea, which may include, but are not limited to, ship sailing speed adjustment, handling rate adjustment at ports, port skipping, and port skipping with container diversion. A proper selection of ship schedule recovery strategies is expected to minimize deviations from the original ship schedule and reduce delays in the delivery of cargoes to the destination ports. This article offers a thorough review of the current liner shipping research primarily focusing on two major themes: (1) uncertainties in liner shipping operations; and (2) ship schedule recovery in response to disruptive events. On the basis of a detailed review of the available literature, the obtained results are carefully investigated, and limitations in the current state-of-the-art are determined for every group of studies. Furthermore, representative mathematical models are provided that could be further used in future research efforts dealing with uncertainties in liner shipping and ship schedule recovery. Last but not least, a few prospective research avenues are suggested for further investigation.