We see lots of numbers thrown around as “facts” with global container volumes anywhere from 70 million to 125 million TEUs and the largest ports are now reporting over 22 million TEU throughput (Singapore and Hong Kong), but they are double and possible treble counting a significant proportion of this by using “moves” as the definition. So let’s start at the basics. The individual carriers should know how many boxes they move and the terminal operators as well. It is after this that things go from opaque to grey to black.<\/p>\n
There is no single industry source of data on container traffic.<\/p>\n
Conferences have a reasonable estimate for their lines, but they mix in empties and guess the non-conference share based on capacity. Terminals do not give an accurate picture to the Port Authorities, or at least not a consistent one. There is a mix of deep sea, feeder and short sea that can end up in the same bucket.<\/p>\n
When it comes to information about where the containers and cargo are destined for, things really get murky. Terminals on the whole do not care and Port Authorities that do, are finding it difficult to extract the information from carriers and forwarders. Complicate this with the evolution of distribution centres and we have a real lack of knowledge. In Rotterdam, for example, over 50% of the containers leave the port by truck and end up in The Netherlands, that’s as much as the port knows. But we know that the cargo moves via distribution centres and is re-packed and distributed to Germany and beyond. In other cases, cargo goes down the Rhine to Germany and is then shipped back to The Netherlands.<\/p>\n
The moral of the story? We need better data exchanges and information systems that increase our knowledge and will help to improve transportation efficiency. Is the industry ready to cooperate? Probably not yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the interesting facts about our maritime industry, comprising not only the carriers and the hinterland transportation providers, but also the ports and terminals is that no one really has any reliable hard numbers about what is going on. Strange, isnt it?<\/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":[52],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-economist"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1358"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}