Competitve advantage through hub & spoke model-a logistics perspective

Looking, acting and engaging East is of core trade interest of India and the present 1/3rd trade of its external trade with its eastern countries is poised to grow further. India's links with its NE states, Myanmar, Thailand and other eastern countries can be more economically beneficial through enhanced maritime connectivity. Massive investments are in the pipeline to meet the futuristic challenges as per the requirements projected by Indian Maritime Agenda-2020, which also indicates development of Chennai & Visakhapatnam as hub container ports.

This paper is based on the concept of Hub & Spoke maritime container trade. The presently utilized hub port on the east coast of India, Chennai is compared with the proposed hub port in Visakhapatnam by use of a Hub & Spoke model. The model will consider 5 ports as spokes-Paradip, Haldia, Chittagong, Yangon and Kakinada. Each of these spoke ports have good containerization potential though not enough to be having a dedicated main line call. It envisages to compare the important aspects of maritime supply chain-Time and Cost and also the economically as well as environmentally beneficial aspect of fuel saving for the two selected Hub container ports. This geographical hub and spoke model bases its analysis on distance, the main variable which has been identified by researchers in similar studies in the past. Thus the model will analyze and compare the selected hub and spoke ports to project which hub port is beneficial in saving time and costs for the hub and spoke cycle and will also project annual competitive advantage.