A strategic appraisal of the attractiveness of seaport-based transport corridors: the Southern African case

• A resource and capability appraisal model is presented to measure the attractiveness of seaport-related corridors.
• Key strengths, weaknesses are identified and corridor attractiveness is ranked.
• The most prevalent resource deficiencies included a lack of co-ordination of resources, ICT systems and corridor brand.
• Capability deficiencies were dominated by the effectiveness of stakeholder interfaces.

The past decade has brought significant growth at, and competition between regional gateway ports and intermediate hub container ports in Southern Africa. Corridors are the essential link between these ports and continental hinterlands. Capacity expansions of seaport and corridor networks (resources), in conjunction with efficient transport services/operations (capabilities) are important to guarantee the attractiveness of a port–corridor combination. This paper focuses on the attractiveness of three Southern African container gateway port corridors (Southcor, Natcor, and Trans-Kalahari Corridors), all contesting the same continental hinterland, namely, Gauteng. By means of a corridor stakeholder survey, this study merges the corporate strategy concept of resource and capability appraisal, with various theoretical principles of corridor attractiveness. The resultant adapted resource and capability corridor appraisal model is then applied to the three corridor cases in question. Consequently, this study presents an empirical framework which identifies each corridor’s key strengths, key weaknesses and the extent to which each corridor is deemed ‘attractive’ by its stakeholders. Furthermore, this study reconciles theoretical assumptions of corridor attractiveness against actual perceptions of corridor attractiveness from surveyed stakeholders.