Competition and cooperation need to co-exist in liner shipping

FOR those of us who learnt our trade in the days of conventional cargo liners, the watershed between "then" and "now" was the arrival , in the 70s, of "the box": the container, Malcolm McLean's brainchild, soon sent all those graceful post-war Greyhounds of the Sea to the breakers.

Meanwhile, Richard Gibney devised an idiosyncratic measurement system, the twenty-foot equivalent unit or TEU, set to irritate those of a logical, metric disposition for years to come, but which has since become ubiquitous.

That was the "container revolution".