The year-on-year declines in box volumes at the Port of Hong Kong have gained a depressing certainty about them as June marked the 17th straight month that could not match its predecessor from a year ago.
Last month throughput fell 11.3% to 1.493m teu compared to the June 2018 figure of 1.683m teu. The cumulative throughput for the first six months of 2019 stands at 9.064m teu.
Drilling down into the June totals reveals that the Kwai Tsing terminals witnessed a 12.7% fall in throughput at 1.163m teu. At the same time midstream operators handled 6.1% less containers with a total 330,000 teu. At the halfway point of 2018, the Port of Hong Kong had handled 9.868m teu.
While it is too early to see any manifest signs of the effectiveness of the landmark Seaport Alliance struck between the four main terminal operators in January 2019, and implementation in April, there must be a fear that going forward the US-China trade war will smother the high efficiency initiative in the short term.
By contrast the port if Shanghai continued to forge ahead, registering an increased container throughput of 5.1% for the first half of 2019 for a total throughput of 21.5m teu. The year-on-year increase for June was 4.4% after 3.76m teu were handled compared to the June 2018 figure of 3.6m teu.
Source:hongkongmaritimehub
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