And in that respect, the container mob must be enviously eying their dry bulk brethren at international ports today. Take Vietnam. The country’s Saigon port is currently suffering from intense congestion of break bulk goods, with a queue of 15+ ships waiting for berths. All this caused by an ‘unexpected’ increase in imports of non-containerised goods. What a nice surprise to be faced – the closest the major container terminals have come to congestion in the past year is dockers waiting for work.<\/p>\n
And in China, where the impact of the dry bulk explosion has been scaled up, some 90 iron ore carriers are waiting for berths, representing a whopping 10% of the global capesize fleet. Adding more salt to the box boys’ wounds, that’s a figure on a par with the percentage of the container fleet currently in lay-up. And average waits for a dry bulk berth in China are a staggering 11 days.<\/p>\n
Then, in dry bulk supremo Australia, the prospect of export capacity exceeding those at the country’s north-west ports within a decade confirms the rosy iron ore future for ports.<\/p>\n
Of course, dry bulk ports are not as transferable as container terminals and, yes, transhipment potential is limited. But the important point here is that as one trade suffers, another is flourishing and those ports that have adopted a multi-faceted approach will be reaping the rewards of their holistic view of port operations.<\/p>\n
On the flipside, ports that have thrown their all into the container business should now be questioning the wisdom of putting all their eggs into one basket; a trade that booms today will not necessarily boom tomorrow. Operators need to spread the love, so to speak, and make sure that your port has the ability to survive the next bust, no matter which sector is hardest hit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As the latest set ofquarterly container throughput figures hits the wire, theres no disguising thecontinued trade slump on the key east-west trade routes. So, perhaps its timeto remind ourselves that seabourne trade is not all about boxes – although itsbeen hard to think of anything else over the past fiery five years. Today,there are still pockets of port business that are seemingly immune to thepressures undoing the container trade.<\/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":[54],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-viewpoint"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1379","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=1379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1379"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}