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1 Introduction
Global supply chains have experienced major changes in recent decades - for example, earlier most of the international volume was handled between two different sides of Atlantic Ocean. However, recent decade time period we have witnessed manufacturing concentration to Asia Pacific, and particularly to China (mostly enabled by enlarging of World Trade Organization, see [12] Ghosh and Rao, 2010). If we look ten years back, Hong Kong sea port along with Singapore were the definite leaders in Asian based logistics. This is not any longer the case - growth of Hong Kong has stopped in late 1990s ([10] Fai, 1998), but on the other hand it has been channelled to other sea ports of China, like Shanghai and Shenzhen (Table I [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]). Also Singapore has experienced levelled off development after year 2008 credit crunch crisis. Other well developed economies (Table I [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]) have also experienced problems in container trade, which examples from the USA (Los Angeles) and Taiwan (Kaohsiung) illustrate. Interestingly, regional hub of Dubai (United Arab Emirates) has surpassed in volumes against Kaohsiung, Los Angeles and Rotterdam.
It is not surprising to find out that container transport in global scale is terribly unbalanced ([22] Lopez, 2003; [23] Lun et al. , 2009; [16] Hilmola, 2011b) and containers typically return from the USA and Europe empty back to Asia (and freight rates are low for cargo, which is still being transported; see [33], [34], [35] United Nations, 2008, 2010, 2011). Some companies in West are nowadays using container vessels as their inventory holding place, due to always surely available capacity and long delays in transportation process ([15] Hilletofth et al. , 2011). These major changes in global trade and container flows have not changed the need for transhipment - its volumes are still on the long-term growth track, but we are looking at rather moderate growth alongside with actual container shipments (in year 1990 one container on the average was loaded and unloaded 14 times during the year, after two decades this has increased to 19 times ([35] United Nations, 2011).
Mostly growth of emerging markets in logistics is due to factory offshoring and production outsourcing wave for low cost and market potential from emerging...