Study On The Cooperation Strategy For Coscon North American Line

Along with the development of the size of container fleet, more and more mega vessels are applied into practice, therefore, in order to minimize the risk and to effectively use the budget for investment, more and more shipping companies adopt the cooperation strategy through line-alliance and share of slot to fulfill the customers' needs and to enhance the comparative advantage for each company.COSCON is the largest container carrier in Chinese and ranks 7th position in the world. Due to the changes of transport operational pattern, reflected by the sailing frequencies, the transport network as well as the customer's requirements, COSCON has to change its role of independent carrier to the international container transport cooperation and actively and penetrate into shipowner's association trying to play as the important organizer and even the leader. Thus, to explore the possibility of cooperation among carriers by using the innovative principles like game-theory, win-win strategy to reduce operational cost, increase frequencies and extend the transport network becomes the important issue for COSCON. This is the intention of this paper.This paper starts with the analysis of the container transport market, followed by the intensive discussion of the current business strategy of container lines. Then, the author applies the famous "game theory" as the theoretical support to assess the business cooperation situation of COSCON American shipping lines. After the analysis of the existed problems, the author also gives some suggestions and the prospective for further development.