Jealousy will out
Uncertainty surrounds the likely success of most proposed port mergers throughout the world, most of which have to overcome political or infrastructure problems. The ports themselves make terse comments and harp on about how confident they are of a union becoming a reality.
This hides the real cause of friction between them: local political jealousy.
Long Beach port has recently lost most of its de facto independence and has been forced into obeying the city authorities. Those authorities, especially the mayor, fear that the much bigger neighbour will come to dominate any sort of union and have voiced strong opposition, but without giving details of logistics or port-related challenges to a merger.
This bears out consultant Christiaan van Krimpen’s assertion that “institutional, legal and political considerations” can be just as important as other factors such as profitability. In Europe a big talking point continues to be Rotterdam/Antwerp, mostly aimed at knocking Hamburg off its pedestal.
There is considerable speculation over Gdynia/Gdansk as a rival to Hamburg, Rotterdam and Antwerp. Gdansk has handled a Maersk Triple E while Gdynia has deepened its draft to 15.5 metres.
Says Neil Davidson of Drewry in a research report: “The North Adriatic Ports Association (NAPA) is a co-operation agreement between the ports of Trieste and Venice (Italy), Koper (Slovenia) and Rijeka (Croatia) with the aim of competing more effectively with North European gateways to Central Europe.
“This grouping faces the challenges not only of fragmentation of volumes and capacity, but also has ports in three countries to balance the needs of, and national interests present a multitude of vested interests. So while it might just be conceivable that, for example, the ports of Hamburg and Bremerhaven work more closely together in future, it is far less likely that Antwerp and Rotterdam will.”
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