Fejfer (APM Terminals) exhorts the ports to adapt infrastructures to the larger ships



"The changes in existence in the field of the marine transport demand not only investments and increase of the efficiency at the level of every single port, but the configuration of the harbour systems must be adapted in order to answer to the current scene of the mercantile traffics, to the increasing dimension of the ships and to the demand for costs more the contents possible". This sollicitation to modify the current harbour systems of many nations, generally founded on a pluralità of ports everyone vocato to serve a regional market or to compete between they in order to satisfy or supernational domestic markets, nowadays is shared many and antipathetic to that they consider it does not have to be necessarily and only the market to impose investments that tomorrow will even be considered inopportune.

This exhortation to change the harbour orders has reached from one of the main world-wide private harbour operators who, as such, must obligatorily answer to the customers and try to satisfy of the question. He is due but to specify also that the company in question is of property of who places the question.

This encouragement to the change, necessary - it has emphasized - "more in the past couple of years that in last the twenty", in fact it is proposed by Kim Fejfer, managing director of the terminalista society Dutch APM Terminals, whose capital entirely is stopped by shipowning group Danish A.P. Møller-Maersk that is leader in the segment of the containerized marine transport with the company Maersk Line, than work also with marks Safmarine, Seago Line and MCC Transport, and that obviously she is the main customer of the 72 operated harbour terminals from the APM Terminals all over the world.

Participating to the eighteenth edition of the Global Liner Shipping Conference, held tuesday and Wednesday to London, Fejfer it has evidenced that this will make the difference and that "in the next few years there will be winners and losers".

The vision of Fejfer is based on a simple ascertainment of the demands with which the managed terminals the company must be confronted: "we - he has explained - assist to three tendencies in our activities. In the past we enlivened ships from 13.000 teu. Now we enliven ships that are of larger 50% and - it has said addressing the representatives of the harbour institutions - we must be ready to enliven these ships from 20.000 teu in all your ports or we will have to assist elsewhere to the transfer of these activities. The traffics - it has emphasized the CEO of APM Terminals - find always the way more efficient than to arrive to destination. In the second place, if in the past it were important to propose contained costs, today the cost more low adjudicates the business. Moreover, if before we were accustomed to centralize the attention on the speed and the flexibility, today the line companies so are concentrated on the cost that coherence and reliabilities want".

"In the today's competitive scene - it has added Fejfer - we must become standardized more in all our total pocketbook, to apply a greater rate technology in our terminalistiche procedures, to make use of our dimension of scale, to use more flexibility regarding the staff, to the partner and the customers in order to reach the next level of efficiency of the field".

According to Fejfer, "at the level of single harbour system there is need of a drastic reorganization. In the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach - it has observed - there are 15 different container terminal, with the various shipowning alliances that they want to scale the their respective terminals, creating so costs and slows down with transfers between the terminals. If the harbour operators want to contribute to supply efficiency to the navigation companies - he has found Fejfer - must set themselves to the guide of the reorganization, the consolidation and the segmentation in order to serve larger ships and smaller ships".

Remembering that the marine carriers are concentrating the ports of call of the ships on a number smaller of ports for giving efficiency to the net of marine services and are therefore restructuring own Networks of routes centralizing them on great gateways and the primary terminals hub, strategy that is destined for Fejfer to define who will win and who will lose in the field of the harbour terminalismo and from which - it has specified - the ports will exit winning that will introduce a strategic positioning, nautical approached adapting and an important depth of the backdrops, Fejer has restated the necessity of "greater investments in harbour infrastructures".