APM Terminals’ executives have recently isolated some of the main challenges faced by international terminal operators.
Vice president and chief financial officer Christian Moller Laursen has described the advent of a “New era in ports” where container yards processing significantly larger volumes from individual vessels as well as general global volume growth will have to move cargoes in time for the next scheduled vessel, and then the process will begin all over again, in some cases on a daily basis.
Another issue is productivity, highlighted by APMT’s Terminals’ head of project implementation, Soren Sjostrand Jakobsen, at the Future Ports conference in Stockholm.
“Our customers are building bigger and bigger ships and it is imperative that we are able to increase our delivered productivity at minimum the same pace as the ships grow – but preferably much more,” he says.