Kaohsiung Port is seeking to boost its competitiveness after handling fewer containers last year than in 2007 and is likely to see its global ranking fall again, the Kaohsiung Harbor Bureau said on Monday.
Hit by the global economic downturn and a dramatic fall in the country’s exports in the fourth quarter of last year, the southern port handled 9.67 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) last year, down 5 percent from 2007, bureau statistics showed.
With Kaohsiung possibly falling out of the world’s top 10 container ports last year, the bureau is exploring ways to reverse the decline, including launching several construction and dredging projects, bureau officials said.
Four deep-sea wharfs, scheduled to be completed in 2013, are expected to increase the port’s container handling capability by 2 million TEUs per year, the officials said.
Improved ties with China may also provide new momentum. Since direct shipping services were established across the Taiwan Strait in mid-December, the number of containers handled by the port has increased by an average of more than 200,000 TEUs per month, the bureau said.
To capitalize on the newly opened shipping links, the bureau intends to develop the port into a value-added distribution center and offer incentives to foreign shippers and warehousing companies to set up facilities there, officials said.
Kaohsiung Port is Taiwan’s largest deep-sea port and was once the world’s third-largest container port. It was ranked as the eighth-largest container port in the world in 2007 behind Dubai and ahead of Hamburg, Germany, handling 10.257 million TEUs per year.
The top five ports in the world were Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Busan.
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