MUMBAI: Peel Port Mersey, the most centrally located UK Port has turned out to be one of the most important key international trade hub for the UK throughout history.
Mentioning about the trade with India, Mr. Stephen Carr, Head of Business Development, Mersey Ports reveals that India is an important player and basically 60 per cent of all trade with India resides with in 150 miles in Port of Liverpool. On the contrary, Liverpool accounts for only 3 per cent of import and export trade with the majority of containers entering the UK via ports in South East England. The Lancashire Port is a major player in trade between Britain and Ireland. The integration of the Port of Liverpool and Manchester Ship Canal means to offer a unique opportunity to drive transformational shift in the behaviour of supply chains that trade beyond the UK, by developing a key logistics platform.
The Port of Liverpool is considered to be the busiest ports in the UK with handling capacity of 30 million tonnes of cargo and 17000 vessels movements every year.
In addition, the development of the in-river Container Terminal will be operational by 2014. It will more than double the Ports existing container handling capacity allowing much larger container ships in Liverpool thus facilitating additional global services calls for Liverpool.
With the new vision, the dynamic personality Mr. Carr smiles and said, that, “Our growth strategy will be to encourage shippers to look at the full “Ship-to-Door” Supply chain costs identifying the value of ports location and the services it provides can deliver to shippers and shipping lines”. He adds, we continue to be proud of our diverse cargo portfolio; which includes grain, animal feed, steel, forest products, RoRo, coal, edible oil and petro chemicals.
Further, we plans to develop new steel terminals capable of handling specialist metals, the expansion of existing bulk warehouse stores in addition to connecting bulk stores with rail terminals. Similarly, the container industry over the last five years has seen significant changes by way of bigger vessels, new rotations, fewer emission and slow steaming.
The biggest issue faced by shipping liner servicing Liverpool is the Panamax lock restriction, but by 2014, the new in-river Container Terminal will eliminate this constraint. With the vessel capacity heading towards 20,000 TEU’s on some trade lanes, ever higher fuel costs, increasing road and rail congestion and environment pressure the re-emergence of a key Northern Port of entry makes more sense than ever.
Mr. Carr informs that we don’t just offer “Port-Centric solutions but “Population-Centric” opportunities to minimize the overall “Ship-to-Door” logistics costs.
Despite the recession, our investment programme is already underway with the purchase of new harbour mobile cranes and enhancements across all of our IT systems, including a new container terminal operating system.
Port of Liverpool is represented by Mr.Ravindra J. Gandhi, Director of Hans Maritime Services Pvt Ltd.
Source: DST News