Dear Colleagues,

International shipping and logistics business has been experiencing a period of fast transformation. The prevalence of negative interest rate and the quantitative easing monetary policy in many leading economies to encourage private investment might result in inconsiderate and careless plans to build an abundance of industrial and logistics facilities. Meanwhile, China, as one of the major growth engines of world trade, has greatly reduced its import and export cargoes. In order to overcome the oversupply of shipping fleets, redundant investment in logistics facilities, abundant warehouse spaces, and the sluggish growth of world trade, resource sharing is one of the more popular and innovative practices via organizing global strategic alliance networks that can ubiquitously generate an efficient and quality response to shippers’ demands.

Alliances and partnerships can help logistics operators optimize their current transportation and storage processes, based on sharing the similar resources through management techniques for reducing operating costs and improving the enterprises’ efficiency and competitiveness. The core spirit of alliance and partnership in a supply chain is represented by sharing economics, which increases the service intensity and reduces logistics resources and facility inputs. The formation of vertical and horizontal partnerships and alliances is widespread in the logistics industry. Closely-knit logistics service providers (LSP) alliances, ship owner consortiums, port operator alliances, and shipping pools are frequently reported in the shipping and logistics industry. Sharing economics can, not only enable logistics service providers to reduce costs, but also help them mutually exchange their management know-how in marketing skill, operation techniques, security management, safety management, financial management, etc., in an innovative way.

The goal of this Special Issue is to attract academics and professionals to discuss the latest global developments in the field of shipping and logistics theories and practices, to set up a platform to present contemporary and significant research results related to shipping and logistics, and to exchange creative solutions to shipping and logistics issues. The Special Issue will discuss solutions for the shipping and logistics industry in a broad scope of innovation management so as to the reduce difficulties encountered by many LSPs in the current turbulent and unstable financial and natural environments.

Prof. Dr. Jong-Khil Han
Dr. Thai-Cherng Lirn
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Logistics is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Shipping Logistics
• Sharing Economics
• Innovation
• Alliances
• Network Economics
• Port Mangement