The European Shippers’ Council (ESC) wants changes to the European Commission’s (EC) Guidelines on the application of competition rules to liner shipping to prevent misunderstandings on what carriers can do under the rules, Exim News Service reported.
An ESC statement stressed that it supported the Guidelines overall, but said the text needed "subtle amendments".
Otherwise, warned the ESC Secretary-General, Ms Nicolette van der Jagt, the Guidelines "risk sending the carriers on a course of exchanging information that is likely to be challenged in the European courts, and does not help deliver the high quality customer service levels that removal of Regulation 4056/86 should bring".
Ms van der Jagt said shipping lines have made joint decisions for decades and have sought to ensure that they do not oversupply the market.
"They have never made their own decisions without this objective in mind. This industry therefore needs guidance as they make the transition to a competitive industry based on independent thought, independent analysis and independent action", she added.
She said the Guidelines only refer to those that did not result in a reduction of competition. "Given that it was the conclusion of the European Commission that the system of information exchange proposed by the European Liner Affairs Association (ELAA) would enable collusion between the lines to manage capacity, keep rates high and reduce competition, any reference to the same system as proposed by the ELAA should either be removed from the text or be made clear that it is not acceptable under Community competition law".
Ms van der Jagt said the ELAA proposed information exchange would result in a reduced level of competition than there would be without it. The system would effectively monopolise the provision of volume data, capacity data and price indices, she said.
"Recent information in all these areas would be collected from every transport document (e.g., bills of lading) on every trade from every line, combined with publicly available information on capacity forecasts, the results and analyses would be discussed so that only one set of conclusions could possibly ever be reached.
"The lines know each other so well—and still cooperate with each other in alliances, consortia and liner conferences elsewhere in the world—that each will be able to anticipate their competitors’ behaviour and align their conduct to ensure the supply-demand balance is restored.
"There is nothing wrong in an information exchange which is used to work out how to compete more effectively and beat the competition. This is what other industries do; this is what we want the liner shipping sector to do", she added.