The growth of the world’s population, globalization, commercial treaties and changes in consumption habits have increased both production and consumption, with the demand for transportation also increaing correspondingly. International maritime transportation, which had grown consistently since 2009 dropped by 3.8%, to around 10.65 billion tons in 2020 because of COVID-19 (Unctad, 2021). Although the same situation has occurred regarding container transportation, the number of containers handled in Türkiye remained practically the same in 2020 compared to the previous year, with Kocaeli harbours actually increasing by 5%. To come up with new storage opportunities in order to respond to this increase in the long term based on structure of the harbors in Kocaeli, their locations, means of transport and connections to other cities will be very hard and expensive. Meanwhile, the Kösekoy Logistic Village is known to have been established with the help of Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Devlet Demiryolları (TCDD, Turkish State Railways) to meet the need for storage and logistical services in the region. As a consequence, how this structure might become functional and find its value among logistical centers needs to be scrutinized.

The study was carried out on container transportation among the horbours in Kocaeli with the permission of firms and agencies conducting container transportation domestically and internationally using the harbours of Kocaeli; firms offering such services as storage, filling, discharging and lashing for the containers handled in the harbors of Kocaeli; firms which predominantly conduct container transportation among logistical centers (over 500 operations per year); and other related firms that offer container services in the study area. The research used seperate questions and answers related to the subject from semi-structured interview forms (surveys) containing 5-point Likert-type questions and open-ended questions that were used in a previous study (Kudu, 2021).

Between September 1, 2020 and March 19, 2021, survey forms were shared with the harbours and related logistical centers in the study area, and the data were collected from one of the senior executive in each firm, mainly using face-to-face interviews and sometimes by phone. While the interview form was understood to be applicable to 52 firms executives from only 37 firms filled out the form.

The firms that were interviewed in the study are classified as harbour managements, stowage managements offering container freight services (CFS), firms mainly offering transportation services, managements with the means to transport and other managements in order to deduce what tendencies they have based on the field of activity and the data analyses. The study attempted to analyze the gathered data using yke Kruskal-Wallis H test (KW) and frequency analyses, in the program IBM SPSS 22.0.

Among the firms the study interviewed, data were collected in full from all harbours (100%), while only partially collected from line-managing firms contributing less (46.1%), resulting in a 71.1% overall collection rate in the study.

The study noted that the majority of the firms to measure their productivity rates with the most used prodactivity rates involving profitability (87.9%), labor (84.8%), machine (60.6%) and energy (51.5%).

Of the firms in the study, 54.1% (n=20) indicated a need for storage and back area opportunities in the harbour or their firm, while the remaining, 45.9% (n=17) indicated that there is no such need for now, with 83.8% of the firms in the sample guessing that they will need storage and back-area opportunities in a decade at the latest.

Of the 37 firms in the study 35.1% (n=13) indicated that CFS processes conducted in the logistics center would not contribute to their volume of business, while 37.8% of the firms (n=14) indicated they would in addition. 

35.1% (n=13) also indicated that CFS processes conducted in the logistics center would not contribute to productivity, while 45.9% (n=17) indicated this processes would contribute to productivity.

The steady increase in the numbers of containers handled, especially in the harbors of Kocaeli, highlights that a need for storage and back-area opportunities will appear within the decade. Because over 80% of sectoral partners share this prediction creating solutions to the need for storage and back area opportunities is important. The use of the Kosekoy Logistics Village, which was organized in the region to offer such services in unison may be able to create a solution for this need. Based on the analyses of the data collected from the face-to-face and telephone interview forms, sectoral partners are understood to predict that such needs that would be met in the Kosekoy Logistics Village would contribute to the volume of business and productivity at an extent. Therefore, studies should be stepp up on how to increase the efficiency of the Kosekoy Logistics Village in order to meet the needs of harbours and sectoral partners concerning storage and back area opportunities.