Resumen de The economic viability of the northern sea route as a seasonal supplement for container shipping between Europe and Asia
This paper quantitatively assesses the Northern Sea Route’s (NSR) competitiveness against the main Europe-Asia trade route, Suez Canal Route (SCR), in container shipping. The main objective is to evaluate the annual economic viability of the NSR as a seasonal supplement to the SCR with various navigational period lengths (120, 150 and 180 days) using two vessel sizes (4,000 and 8,000 TEU) on the Hamburg-Yokohama-Shanghai-Busan-Hong Kong rotation loop. This research is a part of the ongoing PhD study focusing on the broader implications of newly reinforcing and gradually developing Arctic Shipping into a global shipping market. The results show that the seasonal NSR operations can be economically viable but not comparable to the year-round SCR service. The most profitable seasonal combination would be 120 days of NSR and 240 days of SCR operation with profit levels approximately 20 percent lower in smaller vessel size category and respectively 15 percent lower in the larger vessel size category compared to year-round SCR traffic. It was also pointed that the shipping costs of the ice-optimised NSR vessels are 23–34 percent higher during the NSR navigational season compared to open-water ships operating in the SCR. In contrast, in open-water conditions, outside the navigational season of the NSR, the cost difference is only three to four percent.
