For a nearly decade Busan has been the pre-dominant force in Northeast Asian port community, but during the last couple of years, several competitors have looked to directly challenge Busan's regional dominance, most notably, northern Chinese ports. Faced with this challenging and formidable trend, Busan has had to respond appropriately to ensure that Busan remains a regional hub well into the 21st century. The aim of this paper is to make some considerations for a regional hub container port in Northeast Asia in response to changes in the shipping industry with particular reference to Korea.

This paper tries to draw some implications for Korean seaports in terms of management and development of ports with respect to attracting more transshipment container cargoes. For this the results of the Origin-Destination(O-D) analysis between major Korean ports and top 20 Chinese ports were presented. They also contained the O-D analysis between Chinese major ports and their inland hinterlands.