Not all disruptors are equal
COMMENT: Disruption is in the air – or should we say, on the water since this article is about seaports, and will not mention drones. Although one could argue that a widened Panama Canal is really an expansion, not a disruption, and that reconfiguring alliances of large carriers is, likewise, a continuation of an ongoing trend, writes Barry Parker.
But news from a few months back that Amazon, the neo retailer, had entered the NVOCC business should be accurately described as disruption and one that may lead to disintermediation nipping at the heels of those big alliances. Meanwhile, notions of a US infrastructure bank to bootstrap those trillions of dollars’ worth of things to be funded still abound.
While pundits and market participants alike contemplate the impacts of these aforementioned macro trends, traffic is even more snarled than ever. Local freight distribution is the bane of logisticians’ days, certainly around my hometown, and likely in other metropolitan areas along the US East Coast.
Within all this hubbub, there could be opportunities; but ports need to get out ahead of the curve and join the ranks of the disruptors, rather than simply being reactive. One area of interest is the subject of ‘freight mobility’, a catch-all that encompasses the nodes on cargo’s journey after it’s been discharged from a vessel.
In spite of all the great talk about greenfield infrastructure projects, I am thinking that we need to optimise what we have now. The port industry, to its credit, has been in that mode for a while. Bringing increased private investment through PPP projects into the funding mix demonstrates a realisation that freight is just not able to command the attention, and imagination, of politicians in the new reality-TV culture of America, circa 2016.
Business, on the other hand, welcomes properly structured infrastructure investments. Information, derived from sensors, cameras, or wherever, and mashed together as ‘Big Data’ can play an important role in freight mobility. Ports have taken baby steps in this area, albeit aimed at solving more localised problems, starting with drayage and the knotty problem of chassis availability.
It’s time to take a forward looking view on how to better move cargo around the metropolitan area, and the broader region. Private investors are always looking for “the next big thing”; port planners, facing a host of issues, have a unique opportunity to turn all those problems into opportunities.
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