Look beyond rival ports for real competition

Speaking at IAPH’s world conference taking place in Hamburg this week, The Futures Agency’s Gerd Leonhard said that ports need to be most concerned about threats from outside their normal spheres of business.

“Your competition isn’t going to be other ports or other organisations, it will be people outside that get in through the back door,” he said. “You are no longer just in the port business; you are in all the businesses around you and your competitors will come from those business, not from other ports.”

Mr Leonhard called on the industry to ‘hyper collaborate’. “Many of us work in silos: we think of our business a XYZ, but if you look at the most successful business of the last ten years they do not work in silos.

The idea of silos is game over. You have to think laterally: think exponential, combinatorial interdependent and hyper collaboration. If you don’t adapt to these changes you won’t exist in 50 years.

He added that the future of ports rests on transforming dumb infrastructure into smart: “The Internet of Things will be an $8.9tr market by 2020 with over 227 billion connected things. Pretty much everything that can be digitised or automated will be. Everything around us in ports will be e-connected and be moving into the cloud.”

He warned that the kind of disruption that Airbnb – a virtual marketplace for renting space in your home – has brought to the holiday accommodation market will happen in the ports sector as well.

“Have you looked at what is going to happen in 2020 and 2030? You need to do that,” he said. “Change increases gradually and then suddenly; ‘wait and see’ today, means ‘wait and die’.”