Game-changing West Africa
It was only a couple of years back that Maersk Line phased in the last of its 22 4,500 teu WAFMAX vessels, purposely designed to work in West African ports and provide direct services to Asia. However, events are moving fast along the West African coastline and, as Alphaliner recently noted, gearless ships of above 5,000 teu now account for 20% of the total capacity deployed on the Far East-West Africa route.
Notably, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) has also just announced a ground-breaking service to the region that will utilise vessels in excess of 6,000 teu with calls based on a single hub port in West Africa, the Lome Container Terminal in Togo.
The new Lome hub, in which Terminal Investment Limited (TIL), an MSC affiliate, has an equity stake along with China Merchants, effectively marks another major step forward in the development of West African container trade. It is a purpose-designed transhipment hub offering a draught up to 15.5m and designed to operate on a common-user basis. As such, it offers access to the larger size container vessels able to provide direct services and economies of scale.
The common user status of the terminal also points to the intention to create critical mass in the transhipment theatre of operations and to rapidly build market share in this sector. A network of feeder vessels operating along the West Africa coast and further afield will operate in conjunction with the terminal similar to how they function with hubs such as Gioa Tauro or Malta in the Mediterranean. The terminal will additionally be employed for gateway cargo moving into Togo and beyond to central African countries as well as to nearby Ghana.
The development and operation of the terminal can be seen as a bold and ambitious plan designed to ‘capture the market’ in the transhipment sector and to fulfil a strong gateway function. A throughput of up to 500,000 teu is envisaged in the short term with the ability to raise capacity up to 2m teu as demand necessitates.
The Lome Container Terminal, however, is only the first of over five major schemes that are in the pipeline to rapidly raise West Africa’s container handling status and which promise to generate significant competition along the coast for transhipment traffic.