THE SHIPPING CLUSTER OF THE CAMPANIA REGION

The Italian fleet, thanks also to the registration of the ships under the Italian National flag made less burdensome from a fiscal viewpoint, excels for quantity and quality in the main shipping market segments, with points of absolute European and world primacy, for example in the sea transport sector of rolling cargoes (Ro-Ro). The need to control flows of demand sufficient to ensure adequate rates of utilizing the ever more relevant transport capacity of the fleet, and at the same time to maintain a certain level of management independence and flexibility, accounts for the growing recourse by the Italian shipping companies to internationalize, through strategic alliances, acquisitions and mergers, as an international instrument of growth. Italian excellence in the sector is confirmed in certain intense regional concentrations of operators traditionally present in the sector and which represent some of the more significant examples of family businesses who have learned how to expand and grow compatibly with the trajectories of economic development, also in phases of marked fluctuations in demand due to the general instability of the international financial markets and to the difficulties of further growth among western countries. The greater concentration of sea transport of goods firms understood in a strict sense of the word is to be encountered in Campania, in the Bay of Naples to be exact, where the presence of over 40% of the Italian fleet and of some 8,000 direct employees is registered.