Rotterdam Stevedore Warns of Capacity Glut

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

31 Jul 2009

Rotterdam faces an enormous glut of container capacity when a new terminal begins operations in 2013, the head of the port's biggest box stevedore warned. Rotterdam is already facing surplus capacity of between 1 million and 1.5 million 20-foot equivalent units next year as traffic slows, according to Jan Westerhoud, president of ECT. "It would be fatal in this situation to open yet another container terminal with a capacity of a couple of million containers a year," he told Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant. Westerhoud suggested the construction of Maasvlakte 2, a giant container and distribution hub, should go ahead but the first terminal to be completed should delay operations until after 2013. Maasvlakte 2 is at the centre of Rotterdam's bid to protect its position as Europe's top container port from an assault by close rival Hamburg. A consortium led by DP World, the Dubai-based global terminal operator, and including four ocean carriers -- MOL, CMA CGM, Hyundai and APL-- won the contract to build a $1.5 billion, four million TEUs-a-year terminal scheduled to receive its first ship in 2013. A year later, APM Terminals, a unit of Denmark's A.P.Moller-Maersk, is due to open a 4.5 million TEU-a-year terminal on the Maasvlakte, a large tract of land reclaimed from the North Sea.
Initial work on the Maasvlakte began in November and construction of the quay for the first terminal is scheduled to get underway in 2010.
ECT will lose some of its customers when the new terminal opens in 2013 because they are members of the DP World consortium, John Verschelden, director of APM Terminals told de Volkskrant. The new APM terminal also will increase competition within the port, Verschelden said. ECT's Westerhoud rejected claims the company fears competition. "The story that we now have a monopoly in the port and with the advent of the second Maasvlakte suddenly there is competition is nonsense," he told de Volkskrant. "Competition is between ports, not within ports," Westerhoud said.
ECT, which handled 6.3 million TEUs in Rotterdam and three inland terminals in 2008, is a unit of Hong Kong's Hutchison Port Holdings. The company has recently boosted capacity at a new 2.3 million TEU-a-year Euromax facility and an 800,000 TEU customized barge terminal. Rotterdam's container traffic slipped 15 percent in the first half of 2009 from a year ago to 4.6 million TEUs and the port is forecasting full year volume will shrink by around 12 percent from a record 10.8 million TEUs in 2008.

Source: The Journal of Commerce