Looking at micro shipment potential impact on the macro in intra-Asia trades
 With the advent of 20,000-TEU ships - with 23,000-TEUers on the way - there is a tendency to allow the macro to obscure the soaring importance of micro transport, which even in the medium-term may well prove more significant in intra-Asian trade lanes.
Of course, the heavy-weight ships will carry heavy-weight cargoes over the long haul, but as they do, big port-to-big port shipping gets further away from door-to-door, last-mile service.
What's more there is little to worry about at sea on intra-Asian trade lanes. Carriers introduced 10 new services on these lanes last year to capture what London's Drewry Maritime Research says will come close to 30 million TEU when 2017 sums are in and done.
Container Trade Statistics show that intra-Asia volume in January-to-May grew 6.3 per cent year on year, hitting 12.7 million TEU over five months.
Said Drewry: "Growth will be seen in every region with the outlook for Asia the second best, behind South Asia. Intra-Asia may not be as hot as originally thought, but it will still make a significant contribution to world container throughput.
Said SM Line president Kim Chil-bong: "Our customers are looking for more capacity on services to Vietnam and Thailand, where we currently offer one weekly service. We want to launch our own services to India and Indonesia and to add to services to south east Asian markets where demand is strong. "
Cosco and Yang Ming have deployed the biggest ships in the trade and have merged two services into a single butterfly operations using nine vessels with an average of 4,250 TEU. The service connects Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.
What's missing today is sufficient attention to landside infrastructure development. And with the explosive growth of cross-border e-commerce looking like to best prospect for increasing container use, this looms high on the list of priorities. What's critical today is the realisation that containers contain retail goods, whose last mile involves deconsolidated packaged freight delivered by trucks bikes and hand trolleys to the homes and offices of online shoppers.
And if one solves this problem, the solution stands to increase the throughput of marine containers at sea because ocean transport is still the only practical way to get goods from Asian manufacturers to Asian consumers.
And the best hope of doing this in the intra-Asia market is China's amorphous Belt and Road initiative, which has captured world headlines because of its global reach. But this impression conceals its true significance because its role in intra-Asian context stands to prove far more important than its better-advertised Asia-Europe and transpacific roles, simply because that is where most of the Beijing dollars will be spent.
If Belt and Road has both land and sea dimensions, it is fair to say the maritime job has been largely done by the existing service providers, whose capacity exceeds demand even as demand increases worldwide and ports cope with sudden onrushes of cargo brought about by the steady increase in mega ships.
Where work is just starting, given the slower pace of infrastructure development is on road and rail facilities to bring them up to modern standards, as has been largely done in China over the last 30 years.
Eye-catching and headline-grabbing as such projects like Asia-Europe rail freight services are, they are still paltry developments in terms of deliverable tonnage. Every fully loaded China-Europe train cannot take nearly the freight contained on a single average-sized 10,000-TEUer.
What is far more important than Asia-Europe rail service, in almost every respect is improving the import and export delivery capability of emerging markets, which integrators like DHL and FedEx find most promising line of march in the years to come.
Ken Lee, who runs DHL's Asia hub in Hong Kong, echoes the views of his boss DHL Express CEO Ken Allen, when he says intra-Asia consumers are the focus for us today."
"Pakistan is not a rich country," said Mr Lee. "But 50 per cent are below 30. Those are the key e-commerce customers."
The DHL Hong Kong hub posted a 12 per cent growth in volume in the past decade, compared to other trade segments which rose only three to six per cent in line with GDP. The Hong Kong operation handles 40 per cent of its total Asia Pacific shipment volumes, he said.
While this is strictly air freight, the figures also speak to truck volumes with a goodly proportion of the remaining 60 per cent being handled in Shanghai and Singapore
This is where the Belt and Road initiative can do good work, building a length of road here and there or providing a missing length of railway track where it is needed, or paying for half a bridge, the absence of which, blocks trade, or arranging finance with development lenders like the Bank of Japan or the Asian Development Bank or working out financing with western foreign aid agencies in the usual quid-quo-pro arrangements which prevails in the foreign aid world.
So Belt and Road must not be considered as one thing but many. One might well include Africa in the intra-Asian realm as it borders on the Indian Ocean, which with its adjacent seas is shared by Asia. If Egypt can be part of Asia, as it is commonly regarded, it is not too much to include East Africa too.
However promising this trend is, it must be expected that not all will go smoothly. Furthering China's ambition, in seizing the Spratly Islands in the middle Asia-Europe shipping lanes, has been condemned by the World Court and aroused suspicion if not anger of Vietnam, Brunei and the Philippines, not to mention the United States.
Pakistan and Nepal have pulled out of Belt and Road-related hydroelectric dam deals, because of what the host countries considered China's conditions too onerous, though subsequent Beijing-Islamabad talks patched things up without revealing details.
So while Belt and Road has potential, it will take some skill to run the slalom of objections people will raise. But it seems to be a good and worthwhile project. If only China can put its enlightened self interest before its pride, there is every hope that it will enjoy great, if not a historic, success.
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