«The Italian leadership of the port of Savona-Vado recognized by "The Container Port Performance Index" is a source of great satisfaction for Vado Gateway and pride." This was underlined by Santi Casciano, administrator delegate of Vado Gateway, the company that manages the new container platform of the port of Vado Ligure which became operational in February 2020, and Reefer Terminal, the company that manages the in the same airport the terminal specialized in fruit traffic, both 60% owned by APM Terminals and 40% by COSCO Shipping Ports.

Satisfaction is with the last edition for 2023 of "The Container Port Performance Index", carried out annually since 2020 by the World Bank and the S&P Global Market Intelligence, which attributes to the port of Savona-Vado the thirty-sixth position in the ranking of the world's best-performing container ports based on essentially on the dwell time of container ships in the harbours. In the 2022 edition, the Ligurian port was ranked sixty-eighth. In 2023, containers handled by the two terminals in Vada were equal to a total of to about 360 thousand TEUs (+21% on 2022).

Casciano's complacency, in particular, is reported to the primacy of the port of Vada at the national level. In the ranking of 2023 to find another Italian port by scrolling through the list you have to get to the 183rd place where the port of Gioia is listed Tauro which in the 2022 ranking was in 123rd place. 'The reaffirmation of the primacy attributed to port infrastructure by the The World Bank, Casciano said, is a recognition of the indirect to the daily work of workers in Container Terminal and Reefer Terminal, the only ones to handle containers inside the port of Savona-Vado. Skills and the experience gained by our employees, combined with the equipment state-of-the-art technology that characterizes the port system of Vado Gateway in the international terminal scene - has concluded Casciano - are the elements at the base of this important a result that enhances an entire territory."

What follows is certainly not intended to dampen the justified satisfaction expressed by Casciano, as to explaining to our readers what we have already clarified to those who have directly contacted us over the years asking us why we had decided to ignore it from the very first edition the "Container Port Performance Index" report of the World Bank. The feeling we had back then, shared by other observers, is that the report's drafters had done an arduous job of deciding how and what data to acquire, how to evaluate them, treat them and what methods to use to process them, intense activity - this was the feeling - that had not been wanted to frustrate by deciding to proceed with the publication of the results of the survey when, perhaps, it would have been some further deepening and refinement of the work. An impression also aroused by the subsequent editions that little or nothing deviated from the original effort, which is appreciable but perhaps not up to the standards that would be expected from an institution like the World Bank.

B.B.