In a conversation with JOC,com, Maersk CEO Soren Skou complained about the company’s vessels spending more time in ports because the size of the carrier’s ships have doubled in the past few years — an industry move that the Federal Maritime Commission has identified as a major cause of congestion. Excerpts from the article, titled ‘Port productivity is not improving, Maersk CEO says’:

“We continue to build ships that are bigger and bigger and if we can’t get the containers off faster the whole thing will come to a grinding halt,” Skou said on Thursday.

“Since 2007 the ship size in the Asia Europe trade has effectively doubled. We used to have 6,500 TEUs being the workhouse, now it’s the 13,000 TEU ships, which are the workhorses. Our point is simply that port productivity has not doubled since then. While there has been improvement in productivity, we are spending more time in port because of bigger ships.”

He cited the example of the Airbus A380 double-decker jet. “They have the same problem, how do they get the passengers on and off this double-decker plane? They solved it by making a double-decker jetway. What I am asking is, what is the container terminal industry’s version of the double-decker jetway? I ask that question to terminal operators and I never get any good answers.”

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