“The challenge is that a lot of ports have had to be reactive, to peaks, to alliances and so on – all things that are out of a port’s control,” said Drewry’s Neil Davidson at the JOC conference in London this week.
He described the fragmentation in terms of terminal capacity, both physical and in terms of ownership, as “not what the market is looking for”.
Mr Davidson added that throughput peaks caused by ship size upscaling would not be ironed out until ship sizes catch up with trade growth, warning that “it takes times for this to catch up “.