HONG KONG: Hong Kong port business is at risk as its container throughput is pretty much static at the level of 10 years ago while the throughput of ports in Guangdong have climbed high. It is an alarming situation for Hong Kong that its port business can be in danger due to the decline in its container throughput.
But even the flat line for Hong Kong does not tell you how fast the port business is passing us by. Transshipment now accounts for about 65 per cent of our throughput where 20 years ago it was less than 20 per cent.
Transshipment means taking a box off a ship calling from one port on the mainland and putting it on a ship bound for another port in the country. A Beijing-imposed rule says no box can travel between two mainland ports in a foreign-owned ship.
But Hong Kong does not count as a mainland port for the purpose of this rule and so it is just the right place to get around the rule. I wonder if some of this transshipment trade even consists of real boxes rather than just bits of paper that say they come with boxes.
Our port, in other words, is in the business of restoring a small measure of efficiency to shipping arrangements that Beijing has deliberately made inefficient. Let someone in Beijing see common sense and our throughput numbers will plummet immediately. It is the story of Hong Kong’s commercial history in one way. We make our money by doing what the mainland cannot or will not do and must be ready to jump immediately when it can and will do it.
But even the comparison with Guangdong does not tell you the full story of how much our port is in relative decline. The second chart shows Guangdong’s share of total container traffic in the mainland’s coastal ports. That supposed dynamo, the Pearl River Delta, is running a little short of kick these days.
And yet, at a time when our chief executive’s biggest single headache is finding land for 480,000 flats he wants to build, we get a study that says we should instead give the port business a good chunk of what little available land he can find. The problem, this study whinges, is that transshipment requires much more land than straight loading and offloading of containers.
Listen, you daft consultants, the reality is dead simple. The port business was a great idea for us at one time but now has passed us by, just as it once was a great idea for New York and London but now has also passed both of those two by.
These things change. We stay prosperous by staying nimble. Staying with the past will only make us poor. The land is best reserved for housing. What is more, in a few years’ time, housing will also be the best idea for reuse of a moribund container port. The port business is moving across the border, where it belongs.
