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Cargo costs blow out as ships stranded
Tuoi Tre Staff
The cost of unloading cargo at Ho Chi Minh City ports has blown out because of a backlog, with ships queuing for up to a month for an unloading berth.
It used to take only three to five days to unload a ship. But since the beginning of the year, HCMC’s ports have not been able to handle the surge of goods arriving.
Cargo owners face escalating bills for mooring and leasing the cargo vessels.
With customers expecting goods delivered by certain dates, cargo owners are often forced to hire their own stevedores to transfer cargo from the cargo ship – stuck in the queue - to smaller ships to get the goods to shore.
The cost of unloading a kilogram of goods in this manner is about VND300 (2 US cents) more than unloading with cranes, so an owner of the cargo in a 3,000 ton ship would take a VND900 million ($50,650) hit more just for unloading.
Cargo owners even face the risk of being left with a worthless shipment, if perishable goods are delayed too long at the port.
Le Nguyen Anh Thu, sales manager of the Tan Long Chemicals Holding Company in Hanoi, said a ship carrying 2,300 tons of bran had already waited for more than 10 days at Khanh Hoi Port in HCMC, with no confirmed unloading date provided.
While the ship remains stranded in the queue at the port, Tan Long Chemicals has to pay $3,000 a day to lease the ship, Thu said.
In another incident, one of the company’s ships was stuck for 26 days before being unloaded.
Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen, director of Thanh Binh import-export company in southern Dong Nai province, said a 3,000-ton shipment of palm oil had been “detained” at Saigon Port since April 17 and she is yet to be informed when it will be unloaded.
An earlier shipment was stuck in a port queue for more than a month, Huyen said.
Wet weather in HCMC causes further delays at the port, with all unloading coming to a standstill until the rain stops.
And if a ship is not unloaded within two days, it loses its berth and must go to the back of the queue of ships waiting to dock.
Saigon Port General Director Le Cong Minh promised to recruit 1,000 additional dock workers to take the total number of stevedores at the port to 2,600. Minh said the dock workers would work in shifts around-the-clock to tackle the backlog.
He also offered free storage in Saigon Port warehouses to owners of bulk goods to reduce their unloading time by a third. Without access to the warehouses, bulk goods have to be re-packaged at the port depot before being delivered.
However, the Saigon Port chief did not specify how long firms could use the storage facilities for free.
Minh said the backlog at the port was the result an increase in demand. About 3.6 million tons of goods passed through Saigon Port in the last four months, four times more than in the same period last year, he said.
Source: Tuoi Tre
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