Mike King, Special Correspondent | Dec 05, 2011 10:04AM EST
The landlord of Indonesia’s largest port said it will quintuple container storage later this week to help reduce congestion.
State-owned Pelindo II said the new fees would help speed the flow of containers at Tanjung Priok, Indonesia's top container gateway.
PT Pelindo II president director Richard Joost Lino said the increase was a penalty for “errant business people” who left their containers at port for extended periods, according to the The Jakarta Post. Shippers negligence has led to the average storage time of container to rise to six days this year from 5.5 days in 2010, a nearly three-day increase over the average storage time at other Asian ports.
Volume at the port this year is expected to reach 5.8 million 20-foot equivalent units, up 23 percent compared to a year earlier.
Pelindo II would not say when exactly the new charges take effect. A spokesperson for Singapore-based carrier APL said all shippers would be impacted if the new fees were applied across the port.
Indonesia’s economy is growing rapidly but analysts agree that economic expansion is being constrained by the failure to build new transport infrastructure. For example, Indonesia ranked 75th out of 183 countries in the World Bank’s 2010 Logistics Performance Index.
Indonesia will require a minimum of 6 to 7 million TEUs of new capacity by 2015 and an additional 15 million TEUs of capacity by 2020, Michael Lund Hansen, APM Terminal’s Asia-Pacific regional director of portfolio management, said earlier this year. Given the time required for construction of such facilities “the time to get started is now,” he said.
-- Contact Mike King at michael@borderline.eu.com
