NYK zooms in on Yangshan

News was prepared under the information support of Online Daily Newspaper on Hellenic and international Shipping "Hellenic Shipping News".

29 Dec 2007

Japanese carrier NYK Line (Nippon Yusen Kaisha) is poised to take a stake in Phase 3B of Shanghai's flagship deep-water facility, the Yangshan container terminal. The shipping major said “it expects to be chosen as one of the investors'' after a Christmas Eve meeting between its president Koji Miyahara and Shanghai Mayor Han Zhen. NYK's drive to increase its Chinese interests, in what some reports are calling an 'aggressive expansion', has seen it recently acquire 20% of Dalian's Dayaowan Container Terminals' third phase. It has also invested in several ro/ro facilities in Dalian along with Shanghai and Tianjin. Charles Zhang, Shanghai International Port (Group) Co. Ltd. (SIPG) executive vice presidentDeclining declined to say who would be chosen to invest as the decision will be made by the city government. Zhang told Lloyd's List that SIPG, which currently manages and runs all of Shanghai's terminals, "will surely be one of the operators."Yangshan's Phase 3B will have three berths and a capacity to handle some 1.8 million TEUs per year when it comes on-line by either early 2009 or late in 2008. Based on current monthly throughput data, Shanghai has already overtaken Hong Kong as the world's second busiest container port.  The chief executive for PSA in Singapore, the world's busiest, recently admitted that Shanghai could overtake Singapore in a year or two.The past five years has seen cargo handling at Shanghai more than double.  Rapid development of the Chinese economy and the large industrial and trade base of the Yangtze River Delta region have propelled growth.Supporting this growth has been the construction and development of the $2.3 billion Yangshan deep-water facility, which has been developed to allow deep water access at Shanghai to accommodate the world's largest vessels. SIPG vice president Huang Xin was reported saying that the port will have a container handling capacity of 34 million TEUs by 2010, due largely to the construction of Yangshan. The first two phases of the project with nine berths and an annual designed capacity of 4.3 million TEUs have been completed.  Phase III, which will add seven new berths, is designed to bring throughput capacity to 15 million TEUs at Yangshan alone.