Marport preps for box alliances

Marport has an expansion project through to 2015, which will raise its annual capacity to 2.4m teu. The three phase project will “provide a very much needed area for handling our additional feeder traffic as well as main line traffic”, according to Alp Çapa, trade and customer relations manager, Marport Terminal Operators.

Under this project the operator has merged its terminals to operate as a single terminal.

“We are providing capacity for our existing customers and to attract more lines, and we need to keep going.”

Mr Çapa acknowledged that with shipping lines unwilling to pay more for more efficient equipment, space or efficient loadings, terminal operators need to step up to the mark.

“We have to provide these services to sustain what we have,” he said. “The clients we have are very fast acting: the decision to increase to 400 metre vessels in the schedule happened over just two weeks.”