The Shipping Industry 2020: The Last 25 Years

by Donald B. Frost, Principal, D. B. Frost & Associates

Here it is December 2020 – a perfect time to look back. My task – to highlight the events and changes that the shipping industry has experienced over the last 25 years – has been more difficult than expected. Time tends to have a “smoothing” effect on past events and developments, so picking those that really changed things has been challenging. That said, the changes in shipping between 1995 and 2020 have indeed been significant.

On a broad level, shipping responded to the effects of individual national economies blurring together in a manner unlike most other industries, because it was already global. Marketing and finance made the transition smoothly. Operations had the biggest challenges as we entered the new millennium. However, I think the most far reaching challenge, as we entered the 21st Century, was the shipping industry’s realization that, while it called itself a service industry, it had been functioning as a hardware (ship) driven business. We saw this change (assets to service) first in the container lines consolidations at the turn of the century, and the process of change in this area is still progressing today.

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