Excerpts from the Journal of Commerce:
Ports are paying the price for trimming investments in the wake of the 2008-09 global financial crisis that ended years of double-digit traffic growth and must boost productivity or expand capacity to meet rising demand.
Most of the carriers’ productivity gains have gone to their customers via continuous freight rate decreases while handling costs on a 20-foot-equivalent container basis have declined just 0.8 percent a year since 2003 in North Europe and the U.S., and 0.7 percent in Asia.