Posted at 2021.03.31 Category : 読書報告
スエズ運河のコンテナ船の事故をきっかけに積ん読だった本を読み始めました。
今では当たり前になったコンテナですが、コンテナ船の体制ができるまでは反対も大きかったというのは驚きです。現在のあり方の延長で未来を想像してはいけないのはわかっているのですが中々難しいですね。このコンテナはまさにdisruptionという言葉がぴったり当てはまります。
話題になった本なのですでにお読みになった方も多いと思いますが、まだの方にはお勧めできるものです。こんなに安く色々な品物が手に入るのもコンテナ輸送のおかげなんですよね。記事で読んだのですが中国からヨーロッパまでコロナ以前だったらコンテナ一つを22万円ほどで輸送できたそうです。
著者のMarc Levinsonは今回の件でもコメントを色々なメディアで求められているようです。まずはニューヨークタイムズの記事。
こちらではコンテナ船の大型化は、大きければ大きいほど経済的に運搬できるというコンテナ会社の都合だけを優先させていると批判的です。記事でも、港や運河などがコンテナ大型化に対応するために投資をしなければならないものの、利益になるのは運搬会社だけとしています。
As global trade has grown, shipping companies have steadily increased ship sizes — but the Suez Canal blockage showed that bigger is not always better.
By Niraj Chokshi March 30, 2021 Updated 2:22 p.m. ET
For decades, shipping lines have been making bigger and bigger vessels, driven by an expanding global appetite for electronics, clothes, toys and other goods. The growth in ship size, which sped up in recent years, often made economic sense: Bigger vessels are generally cheaper to build and operate on a per-container basis. But the largest ships can come with their own set of problems, not only for the canals and ports that have to handle them but for the companies that build them.
“They did what they thought was most efficient for themselves — make the ships big — and they didn’t pay much attention at all to the rest of the world,” said Marc Levinson, an economist and author of “Outside the Box,” a history of globalization. “But it turns out that these really big ships are not as efficient as the shipping lines had imagined.”
Despite the risks they pose, however, massive vessels still dominate global shipping. According to Alphaliner, a data firm, the global fleet of container ships includes 133 of the largest ship type — those that can carry 18,000 to 24,000 containers. Another 53 are on order.
こちらの記事もコンテナの大型化を扱っていて、著者の論調も同じです。まあ論調が変わったら問題ですね。
By Harry Dempsey By Philip Georgiadis By Sylvia Pfeifer
29 Mar 2021 02:06PM
JUMBO JETS OF THE SEA
Marc Levinson, a historian specialising in containers, said shipowners bore significant responsibility for the mess in global supply chains because of their pursuit of ever-larger vessels.
“Their attitude was, ‘We will do what’s best for us and ignore the rest of the logistics industry,’” he said. Larger vessels “worked when the ships were at sea but totally fouled up the land side of the transport system”.
Large vessels will once again lengthen logjams as the chain of disruptions from the Suez accident plays out.
Soren Skou, Maersk’s chief executive, said huge vessels had been sailing through the Suez Canal for “years and years” and that the 220,000-tonne Ever Given had jammed itself at the narrowest point in the waterway.
“The jumbo jet Boeing 747 was the biggest for many decades. It was the optimal tradeoff between cost per seat and tradability. That’s where we are,” he said.
ここで例に挙げたBoeing 747やエアバスA380は廃れてしまいました。コンテナ大型船も同じ運命を辿るのか、中国と米国の貿易戦争やEUとイギリスの関係などから、小型化が進むかもしれないとニューヨークタイムズの記事は描いていました。
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