Off the transhipment seesaw

Of course, the political developments will still put a certain crimp in things, but less, probably, than those facing a facility which relies on domestic ‘gateway’ traffic. Certainly there is not as much money in the North African economy than previously.

Moroccan facilities are placed well for the blooming African economies. Hartmut Goeritz of APMT’s TangerMed1 facility says: “It’s truly amazing to see how Africa is developing. We are seeing more and more direct services starting to go into West African ports, but it is also benefiting North African transhipment too.

However, the flow from these economies, while generally good for volume counts, come with an unavoidable knock-on effect for port operations.

Mr Goeritz explains: “With countries in this geographical scope, you have to be flexible about onward shipments. For example, a fair number have security issues from time to time, and – for example – Abidjan in the Cote d’Ivoire has been shut for a while. What this means it that extra space is needed to hold overflow traffic bound for the West African nations when there’s a hiccup, and of course yard production goes down. It is a fairly common event.”

However, because it’s transhipment, it’s not just immediate neighbours having a bad case of the “hiccups” that causes trouble. On the other side of North Africa, the Suez Canal Container Terminal had issues when troubles in Libya and Syria kicked off, as the boxes got stuck in the container yard. “It all happened quite quickly and our terminal space ended up as a yard extension to the Libyan and Syrian ports,” says Robert Hambleton of SCCT. “It wasn’t confined to Libya and Syria, as the resultant yard congestion meant we had to apologise to customers in the transhipment chain, all the way across to Turkey.”

Despite the fact that it was sorted out – the facility worked with customers to get the cargo rerouted and gained a bit of breathing space – it all illustrates the point that it’s now a very small world.