The portcentric business model has so far been primarily applid to the container business, and in particular the way container transport supports UK high street retailers and their customers.  But it also had applications for the liquid and dry bulk industries.
Doll Shipping Consultancy's Fred Doll argues that there is a growing opportunity for ports, shipowners and cargo owners to develop portcentric solutions resulting in lower costs and also catering for growth areas in bulk cargoes.
"There are certain megatrend that support portcentric for bulk cargoes," he says, pointing at higher food prices, energy costs and steel prices, while everyone is searching for a better return on capital employed.
"There are two ways to improve your return on capital employed –  either improve our return or reduce the capital.  And there are two ways to do the latter – you can sweat the assets or outsource the activity," Mr Doll adds.
While headlines of bulk cargo stories have been dominated by the massive growth in Asia, Mr Doll says strong demand remains in Europe.  Between 2005 and 2009, vegetable oil volumes in Europe increased from 24m tonnes per year, much of it driven by increased demand for biofuels, particularly bio-diesel, he says.
While demand for non-fuel vegetable oil in that period remained static at 21m tonnes per year, bio-diesel volumes rose from around 2.5mt to 8,5m tonnes in the same period.  European Union bio-diesel production had risen from 4.9m tonnes in 2006 to 8.4 m tonnes in 2009 and is forecast to reach 9.8m tonnes for last year.
"This is all being driven by government and EU biofuel mandates to meet renwable energy targets," says Mr Doll.  The EU has a renewable energy target of 20% by 2020 and the UK has a 15% target, while 10% of transportation fuel must be bio-diesel by the same period, up from the current level of 2.6%.
This presents a particular opportunity fo shortsea bulk shipping within the EU.  While soyabeans from Latin America are a traditional source of bio-diesel, recently sunflower and rapeseed oil imports into the UK have been growing sharply as they give a far better gallon-per-acre fuel yield.
In 2005, 450,000 tonnes of sunflower and rapeseed meal was imported into the UK, rising to 800,000 tonnes in 2009, and in the same period rapeseed meal imports rose from 50,000 tonnes to 400,000 tonnes.
"What you see with this trend is that the economic parcel size of each shipment has gone down," Mr Doll says.
"Whereas the soyabeans from Brazil tend to be transported in 25,000-tonne to 50,000-tonne parcels, if you look at rapeseed, parcels of less than 10,000 tonnes can work.  These shorthaul cargoes are relatively stable and additional port capacity will be required because future growth is very likely.
"There is an increased role for optimized, shared facilities that would spread the risk across ports, logistics providers may have under utilized land and construction costs are now lower than they were at their peak," he adds.