Members of the Shipping & Transport Committee enjoyed a tour of Hongkong International Terminals (HIT) on 17 November. HIT is one of the operators at Hong Kong’s Kwai Tsing Port, which remains one of the biggest and busiest ports in the world, even amid growing global competition.
Bertha Ung, Manager, Group Corporate Affairs, explained to members that HIT is part of Hutchinson Ports – a global company that is rooted in Hong Kong. It has more than 50 ports in 26 countries around the world, and handles more than 80 million TEUs annually. Hutchinson Ports’ portfolio includes Yantian in Shenzhen, which can accommodate five mega vessels at a time, the United Kingdom’s biggest port Felixstowe, and Barcelona, which is one of the company’s first semi-autonomous terminals.
“The recently built Terminal D at Laem Chabang Port in Thailand also uses a lot of automation, including autonomous trucks,” Ung said.
Technical upgrades such as increasing automation are being introduced across the company and will be a key focus of the industry’s future development.
“Hong Kong is not as automated as some other ports, including those in China,” Ung explained. “Hong Kong port has a long history, and it is more difficult to change current equipment. It is a lot easier to introduce automation in a new terminal, like in Thailand.”
However, there has been some retro-fitting of the facilities in Hong Kong, and the visitors had the opportunity to see some of HIT’s remote crane operators at work. Their air-conditioned offices and computers are much more comfortable than the cranes, where they are isolated and exposed to the weather throughout their shift.
“Remote control provides better working conditions, and means they can operate more than one crane at a time, so it is also more efficient,” Ung said.
Members then had the opportunity to see the port in action on a drive around the yard, which was buzzing with activity, with a constant flow of trucks and several ships being loaded and unloaded. Some of the biggest cranes on site are as high as 50 storeys.
The Covid-19 pandemic has created a number of issues for the shipping sector in the past two years. Supply chain bottlenecks have been in the news recently: in October, a record backlog of 100 ships was waiting to unload outside the Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex in the United States.
“The supply chain disruption has not been as serious in Hong Kong as in other places,” Ung said. “The U.S. and Europe have also been impacted by a shortage of truck drivers, which has made the situation worse.”
Although ports in Asia have not been so badly affected, they have still had to deal with ongoing issues such as the knock-on impact when ports around the world have shut down temporarily due to local Covid outbreaks.