Treading a fine line on co-operation
Ports need to tread carefully to avoid co-operation in commercial areas
“Co-operation” is today a sensitive word in the European port business. Against a background of European anti-trust officials raiding several of the world’s largest shipping lines to investigate possible collusion, port and terminal companies now have to tread very carefully on co-operation.
The same point applies to port authorities and terminal operators in different ports serving the same or over-lapping markets – no collusion on pricing is the principle that must be adhered to in order to provide the competitive environment from which it is felt port users will benefit most.
It is clearly an irksome point within the European Commission that its earlier attempts to introduce a Port Services Directive (PSD) have ended in failure. One of the principal goals of the mooted PSDs was to introduce financial transparency – transparency which in its view would doubtless have gone a long way towards removing any excessive cooperation between port authorities and/or terminal operators.
It is hardly surprising then that we now hear that Brussels intends to revisit the idea of a PSD in 2013. The prospect of this happening was first signalled in a Transport Policy White Paper but was confirmed by Siim Kallas, European Commission vice-president responsible for transport, on the occasion of his recent visit to the port of Rotterdam.
This time round, however, it is widely expected that the Commission will avoid what formerly proved to be the hottest issue of port services; the so-called self-handling via which ships’ crew can handle cargo at the quayside rather than port labour. This proposal initiated violent protests by stevedores along the European coastline and played an influential role in Brussels dumping its PSD initiative.
If a PSD does finally come into being then this combined with existing European cartel or monopoly abuse rules may change the existing dimensions of port and terminal cooperation by introducing a new sensitivity to the very idea of cooperation.
Certainly, it may place beyond practical reach initiatives such as the one mooted at the end of last year by APMT’s managing director in Zeebrugge that the port of Zeebrugge should work closer with the port of Antwerp to jointly compete against the port of Rotterdam.
The idea of using Zeebrugge’s deepwater and Antwerp’s strong hinterland connections to compete against Rotterdam has some merit in theory but the scrutiny such an initiative may receive is just one more reason why it is unlikely to happen.
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