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Berth productivity falls at 20 top ports in face of mega ship challenge

BERTH productivity at 20 of the biggest ports in Asia and Europe is in decline, according to new analysis presented by CTI at the 20th TOC Asia Container Supply Chain conference.

Despite carrier pleas that port productivity levels need to improve to handle mega ships, berth productivity levels at the world's largest ports are falling.

CTI Consultancy partner Andy Lane said that terminal productivity relative to average vessel call size showed productivity levels dropping.

Mr Lane took 20 major ports ?five Asia gateways, five Asian hubs, five European gateways and five European hubs ?for his analysis.

"As call size is a major determinant of crane intensity, then we might expect berth productivity to fall if the average call size decreases," he said.

"What we observe is that berth productivity has fallen by further than call size. So whichever way you chose to measure it productivity is in decline," he told delegates.

In the five European hubs, average call size had reduced by 19 per cent while productivity had slipped by 22 per cent. In the five European gateway ports, average call size had fallen eight per cent while productivity had dropped 11 per cent.

In the five Asian hubs, average call size had decreased by four per cent while productivity had declined 11 per cent; and in the five Asian gateway ports, average call size had gone down 18 per cent while productivity had declined by 27 per cent.

The data included 45,722 calls across the 20 ports and involved over 51 million container moves. Overall, Mr Lane found that average vessel call size had reduced by 12.5 per cent in the first half of 2015 compared with the same period the year before.

He speculated that this could either be due to the new alliances having more direct port-pairs and thus more ports per service, or it could have been potentially due to lower utilisation levels. "Maybe we should not claim that increasing call size has been a major challenge," he added.

Instead, while seven per cent of total calls at the 20 ports involved exchanges of 3,000 moves in the first half of 2014, by the corresponding period in 2015 this had dropped to just six per cent of calls.

And, out of total moves in the entire period, 23 per cent were in "batches" of over 3,000 in the first half of 2014 - a figure than remained the same in 2015.

This led Mr Lane to conclude that despite port operator claims that congestion was the result of influxes of large numbers of containers in single calls, "the era of the mega call has not yet arrived".

For 40 years, TOC Worldwide has provided the market-leading conference and exhibition forums for the global port and terminal industries and their customers. With a change of name to TOC Container Supply Chain, the TOC event portfolio now attracts a wider audience of container supply chain professionals.