Who will pay for a port productivity revolution?

London - Maersk Line’s CEO Soren Skou recently called for a “leap frogging move” to raise port productivity levels, asking what is the container terminal industry’s version of the “double-decker jetway” developed for handling passengers on the world’s largest passenger airliner, the Airbus A380. He complained that whilst ship sizes in the Asia-Europe trade have, for example, doubled, port productivity has not. Ship time spent in port per round voyage has increased 50% from 12 to 18 days. The simple fact is that while overall berth productivity does increase with ship size, it does not increase directly in line. For the three example sizes of ship, the number of boxes exchanged per call increases in direct proportion to vessel size. The moves per hour per crane remains constant but the number of cranes deployed per vessel increases for the larger vessels. The increase in port productivity does not match the increase in ship sizes, and time in port increases as a result. For example, the 19,000 teu vessel is nearly 50% bigger than the 13,000 teu vessel, but the berth moves per day is only 20% higher.

One of the key reasons for this is that the length of vessels has not increased linearly with their teu intake (they have got wider, deeper and stacked higher instead). For example, the length of the 19,200 teu MSC Oscar is less than twice that of a first generation 1,400 teu ship, yet its teu capacity is nearly 14 times greater. Similarly a 18,300 teu Maersk Triple E vessel is only 25% longer than the 7,400 teu Regina Maersk class, yet carries 150% more teu. The largest vessels have, for the time being at least, reached a plateau of around 400 metres in length. This means that the number of gantry cranes deployed cannot be increased in direct proportion to increased ship sizes. It is also the case that the cost and availability of labour in some locations restricts the number of additional cranes than can be deployed on each ship.

Drewry’s View

Bigger ships are spending proportionately more of a round voyage in port than their predecessors. To meet carriers’ demand for markedly higher port productivity requires a fundamental change in the way that containers are handled. Innovation is always risky and costly though. Who is going to pay to design, test, develop and implement the “double-decker jetway” for ports?