RLL Container Report - 03 December 2014
From: John Keir, Ross Learmont Ltd Email: john.keir@telia.com Date: 03 December 2014
Some talk of Alexander, and some of Hercules
Of Hector and Lysander, and such great names as these.
These lines from the march,”British Grenadiers” were introduced to Britain during the reign of the Dutch Stadholder, King William III. Now, Hector Rail and the Dutch Van Dieren Multimodal plan to introduce additional services to their current 11 intermodal trips from Duisburg to Nässjö and Katrineholm in Central Sweden. Soon, we may also be singing the praises of Chinese Railway. In co-operation with Deutsche Bahn, Chinese Railway has dispatched a block train with 30 x 40’ HC containers carrying exports from the Chinese city of Yiwu in the Province of Zhejiang to Europe. The containers are marked with the TBJU prefix, which is the official BIC code for China Railway Container Transport and the export cargo is destined for the Spanish capital of Madrid almost 13,000 km to the West. The transit time is reckoned at 21 days, which would make it both the longest rail container service in the world and the fastest transit time for a block container train between China and Spain.
However, the plan may have an Achilles’ heel. China Railway could have difficulty in finding regular backhaul cargo from Spain to Yiwu, though their partners at Germany Railways (DB) may be able to source cargo from Germany. Also, it may be a “hard sell” trying to source regular cargo flows in both directions, as Yiwu is only 250 km from Ningbo, one of China’s biggest and most modern container terminals with several sailings per week to and from the main European ports.
Chinese companies are just as active at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, where the final pieces of the pan-European logistics jigsaw are falling into place. Piraeus Port Authority (PPA) has approved a long-awaited agreement with Cosco Pacific, which paves the way for a Chinese investment of Euro 230m in Greece’s biggest port. China has already invested a similar sum in developing Piraeus and a further Euro 2 Billion may be ploughed into transport developments in South Eastern Europe. Piraeus lies close to the Suez Canal and the Greek transport network provides direct access to the markets of S E Europe as well as the more developed economies of Central Europe.
Piraeus now needs to upgrade its infrastructure, as containerised goods moving by rail go primarily to Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Developments in Piraeus came as China Shipping Container Lines (CSCL) took delivery of the first of five 19,000-teu capacity vessels being built by Hyundai Heavy Industries. Fortunately, Chinese exporters appear more than capable of providing additional products to fill these newly anointed Kings of the Seas. In October, the port of Shanghai handled 3.02 million teu, which represents a rise of 7.5% on last year’s total and a slight improvement on the figure for the month of September. The total for the first ten months of the year reached 29.5 million teu - up 5.3% on the same period in 2013. Further south, the Port of Singapore reported a 3.6% rise in box traffic in the first ten months of this year, as 28.1 million teu passed through the island state. More importantly, the increase in traffic was maintained through into October, when box traffic rose by 7.7% to register a monthly total of 2.97 million teu. Analysts predict that this combination of rising trade volumes and the introduction of larger vessels will raise average weekly slot capacity by 9.5% year-on-year from 246,000 TEU to 270,000.
Europe’s largest container port is preparing itself to receive the larger container carriers. In the last week of November, APM terminals opened its new container facility in the Maasvlakte II area of the port of Rotterdam. With a one-kilometre long deep-water quay and eight super-post-panamax cranes, the new APM facility will be capable of handling up to 2.7 million teu per annum. Box handlings at the HHLA terminal in Hamburg rose by 1.8% buoyed by an 8.5% jump in Far East traffic. However, feeder traffic to and from the Elbe port to Russia dropped by 5%, as sanctions and embargoes took their toll on the Baltic trade.
Fortunately, there is much more growth to come from rapidly expanding markets. APM Terminals has signed a deal to add four deep-water berths at the port of Tema in Ghana. The government is to invest one Billion dollars to propel the West African state into the big league. The plan includes improvements to road and rail connections, all of which measures will raise Tema’s capacity from its current 670,000 to the projected 3.5 million teu. It should be noted that this increase is equivalent to the capacity of APM Terminals’ new facility at the Maasvlake in Rotterdam.
Several other projects in West African ports are under construction. In Togo, the Port of Lome is to be expanded from its current capacity of 300,000 to 1.2 million teu. At the same time, CMA CGM is investing USD 300 million in the Nigerian port of Lekki, which will take the terminal’s annual throughput to 2.5 million teu. Ten kilometres from Lagos, APM terminals is raising capacity at Badagry Port to one million teu. Over in Senegal, DP World is working on Dakar’s Port du Futur, which will have a capacity of 1.5 million teu. By 2020, nine projects in West Africa will raise the region’s throughput by 11.5 million teu per annum. Large volumes of containers require additional feeder slots operating out of main European ports. It was for this reason that the French container operator, CMA CGM confirmed its takeover of German short-sea operator, Oldenburg-Portugiesische Dampfschiffs-Rhederei, which operates services from Northern Europe to Portugal, Spain and the Canary Islands.
The prize for the most exotic-sounding container route in Europe must go to a new service, which starts in January of next year. The intermodal service will link Hungarian rail terminals with major European ports. Xanga Group are co-operating with GYSEV cargo to offer intermodal services from the port of Koper, Rijeka, Hamburg, Bremerhaven and Rotterdam. The container train service calls at the Hungarian towns of Miskolc, Nyíregyháza, Tiszaujvaros, Mátészalka and Békéscsaba areas, as well as Cluj Napoca (Kolozsvár) in Western Romania.
John Keir, Ross Learmont Ltd.
03 December 2014
Copyright ©, 2014, John Keir