The last few years have had their problems with congested facilities due to full and then empty boxes crowding out the tarmac. 2009 sees the industry with excess capacity and offering space for storage of empties. How quickly global economics can change the market conditions.<\/p>\n
The four large global container terminal operators have all reported their 2008 results and in one case the Q1, 2009 results. They mirror the carriers. The first nine months were stellar, then the bottom dropped out. HPH reported throughput of 67.6m teu with an increase of 2%. PSA recorded 63.2m teu, up 7.3% and APM Terminals grew 8% to 34m teu. Not far behind was DP World with 27.7m teu, a growth of 15%. Revenues were in the range of $3bn to 5bn. Profit growth was mixed, but all positive.<\/p>\n
Like their customers, the terminal operators are concentrating on reducing costs and finding complementary operations to generate landside revenues. The common factor of terminal operators is extreme caution for 2009. A wait and see attitude.<\/p>\n
The last few years have seen a boom in terminal expansions and investments in new Greenfield sites. Based on the annual and quarterly reports this has come to an end. The cautious attitude has resulted in a sharp drop in capital investments and focus is on upgrading existing facilities and holding off on new sites. Investment will be down by over 50% and relationships with port authorities trying to privatise is in a state of change. Given the severity of the global recession and the cautious approach of consumers this is certainly the right approach.<\/p>\n
With much of the growth having been based in Asia, all eyes will remain on China. As China grows so will the fortunes of the liner industry. It used to be “as Detroit goes, so does the rest of the world”. Let’s hope not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the liner shipping industry facing a calamitous year as a result of excessive over capacity and falling demand one would expect a similar pattern to emerge on the landside with the terminal operators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-2583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-economist"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2583"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=2583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}