MANILA: Starting this weekend, the two private port operators in Manila will transfer about 3,000 shipping containers to Subic to decongest the two main seaports in the metropolis.
The Philippine Ports Authority (PPA) said a containerised cargo ship owned by Hanjin Shipping docked in Manila last Wednesday from Hong Kong.
It was chartered by the International Container Terminal Services Inc (ICTSI), which runs the Manila International Container Port (MICP), and Asian Terminals Inc (ATI), which handles the Port of Manila (POM), will be transporting cargoes cleared by the Bureau of Customs (BOC) and cargoes overstaying for over 60 days at the MICP and POM to Subic. For 15 days, the Hanjin vessel has been chartered to make three trips between Manila and Subic to transport a total of 3,000 container vans. For its initial trip, it would transport 900 containers. The MICP and ATI would shoulder the charter cost of P14m.
In today’s scheduled Cabinet Cluster on Port Congestion meeting, PPA general manager Juan Sta Ana is reportedly intending to propose to the BOC if it is open to the idea that aside from the 60-day cargoes, they would also move to Subic the containers that have been cleared by the bureau and those that have been overstaying between 30-60 days.
This would bring the total number of containers to be brought to Subic from 3,000 to about 7,000. If the BOC is amenable to the proposal, Sta Ana is inclined to make a second proposal to extend the hiring of the Hanjin vessel for another 15 days and pay an additional P14m or a total of P28m.
Meanwhile, the PPA said in a statement there has been a “significant” decline in the cargo backlog and number of empty container vans that have been clogging the two ports.
“Based on our current inventory, we have to clear about 8,175 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) as we are now below the 90 percent yard utilisation threshold,” said Sta Ana.
He added that the number of empties inside the ports also went down to only 12,000 TEUs, and the held-up containers at foreign ports have likewise declined from 37,000 TEUs some two months ago to only 20,000 as of this August.
“The reduction in the number of laden and empty containers suggests that productivity has increased dramatically, resulting in better efficiency in handling cargoes and vessels at the Manila ports,” Sta Ana added.
About two months ago, the number of laden containers that piled up at the Manila ports totalled 99,000 TEUs, which occupied about 105 percent of the yard while the total of empty containers also reached a high of 22,000 TEUs.
The congestion was caused mainly by the daytime truck ban imposed by the Manila city government from February 24 to end-May of this year that effectively limited the movement of cargoes in and out of ports during nighttime only.
THE PHILIPPINE STAR
