This is the first in an article series in which we attempt to unearth dynamics of the shipping industry, by analyzing publicly available import shipment data in the United States.

In this article, we’ll take a look at market share dynamics for shipping lines – businesses that transport cargo aboard ships – and see how they’ve varied over the last few years. We’ll also look at traffic into ports in the US, origin ports from which the shipments leave, and the route links taken. The goal in exploring these questions is to understand market dynamics around key players, geographical locations and entrenched behaviors in the market, and trace how dynamics have changed through the years as market forces have had their say.

The answers to these questions come from an analysis of publicly available import data from the United States Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Automated Manifest System. This data spans approximately five years, and covers 180 million data points. Here’s what we found.

Shipping Lines

Click here to read the rest of this article on the Semantics3 blog