Terminal ownership structures and equity ties in the Italian port system: a Stochastic Actor Oriented Model

Terminals are strategic assets in ports, as junction node between the "sea" and "land" phases along the logistics supply chain. Thanks to the privatization and deregulation of the port industry, these strategic assets have increasingly attracted the interest of global players, who aim to consolidate their market position through horizontal and vertical integration processes. Furthermore, the industry has witnessed an increase of equity cooperative agreements, and specifically equity joint ventures (EJVs), for sustaining investments in new terminals and entering new foreign markets. This large number of partnerships generates complex relationships network and companies try to be engaged in new partnerships for facing international competition. However, the competitive and cooperative relationships between competing neighbouring terminal containers deserve attention from port authorities both at intra-port and inter-port competition. Joint ventures are hybrid forms of organization between a pure market and hierarchy, and they are often discussed under concepts of strategic alliance and inter-organisational relationships, dyadic or network-like arrangements. An interesting research stream drawing on network literature views equity venture as a stand-alone entity, seeking to maximize its own performance. It offers important insights on the EJV's impacts on the domestic market. Adopting this perspective, the objective of the paper is to analyse new partnerships formation in the Italian container terminal industry as expression of coopetitive strategies performed by terminal operating company (TOC). To this end, TOC can be interpreted as ego-network according to the network approach, where links between the ego and alters are equity ties. These reticular equity structures express different organizational behaviours and relational patterns (horizontal and vertical integration processes). From the methodological point of view, the study applies the Stochastic Actor Oriented Model, shedding light on the new ties' formation and network structure of container terminals in two waves (2011 and 2015) in terms of: size (number of equity ties), density (propensity to build equity ties) and business' partners (homophily and heterophily). This perspective of analysis favours the understanding of strategic choices of TOCs as well as their power and dominant position in the industry, at national level. It thus provides relevant information to policy makers as it highlights network centrality measurement and TOC's attitude to build supply chain relationships. Results show that the Italian container terminal industry is characterized by leading positions of a few players that have increased the number of equity ties in pursuing coopetitive strategies. These issues are of crucial importance and deserve attention from the Port Authorities with reference to the terminals' concession policy and competition in the market.