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Container handling at Kaohsiung Port hits 10.26m TEUs

The container handling volume at Kaohsiung Port reached a total of 10.26 million twenty-feet equivalent units (TEU) last year, a 4.9 percent increase from the volume in 2006, Kaohsiung Harbor Bureau said yesterday.

"This is the first time we have broke the 10 million TEU benchmark," bureau deputy director-general Huang Kuo-ying (黃國英) said. "We also surpassed the target set by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications [MOTC], which was 10.20 million TEUs for 2007."

On a monthly basis, container handling last month topped 915,000 TEUs, a new monthly record for the southern port.

Huang said that export and import containers accounted for approximately 50 percent of the total volume. Compared with 2006, the total number of export and import containers last year increased by about 516,000 TEUs, or 11.2 percent.

Huang said that growth could be attributed to rising demand for raw materials, including millet and corn, from China and India.

Rotterdam continued to beat Kaohsiung in terms of container volume, Huang said.

Last year, Rotterdam announced that it had topped 10 million TEUs in November, whereas Kaohsiung did not reach the benchmark until the end of last month, he said.

A stronger euro prompted a large number of "businesses to purchase a large quantity of raw materials from Asia," he said. "Nearly all the container ships heading to Europe were fully loaded."

Kaohsiung also faces strong competition from Dubai, which now serves as a vital trading port in the Mediterranean sea route.

For this year, Huang said Kaohsiung Port had set a container volume target of 10.5 million TEUs.

Meanwhile, Keelung Port reported that container handling totaled 2.22 million TEUs last year, up 4.1 percent from 2006.

Despite the increase in container volume, officials had warned that Kaohsiung's global ranking would continue to slide.

A report published in the Chinese-language Commercial Times last year, quoting Kaohsiung Port director general Shieh Ming-huei (謝明輝), said that Kaohsiung was likely to be outranked by Rotterdam and Dubai to the eighth largest trading port in the world, down from No. 6.
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