Too much fragmentation in Argentinas ports

“It isn’t thinkable that they can become competitive, if competition is so fragmented and so savage that nobody can invest because the market isn’t big enough to even cover annual operating costs,” he said.

Mr Borrelli added that the ports industry is driven by economies of scale and that dividing space up between lots of terminals is futile, since there is no way that investment can be justified. He offered up Chile and Peru as examples where container handling has been successfully concentrated.

“I believe that by having a terminal in La Plata (Tecplata), Exolgan and a couple of terminals in Buenos Aires we would have enough,” he said, adding that this would enable Argentina to handle 3m teu, a realistic figure that could be generated once the economy has recovered.

To achieve this, he suggests that there will have to be mergers among existing terminal operators in the Port of Buenos Aires.