Business News
Taiwan's Kaohsiung Harbour begins to build deep-water terminal
By DPA
Dec 31, 2007, 9:23 GMT

Taipei - Construction of a deep-water terminal began Monday at Taiwan's Kaohsiung Harbour to boost its declining competitiveness.

Prime Minister Chang Chun-hsiung presided over the ceremony launching the construction of the 12-billion-Taiwan-dollar (375-million-US-dollar) International Container Terminal.

Taiwan's Yangming Marine Corp won the contract to build the deep-water terminal at the harbour in southern Taiwan.

Under the contract, Yangming is to build the container terminal in two phases and operate it for 50 years. The terminal is to consist of four 375-metre-long, 16-metre-deep wharves.

The first wharf is due to begin operating in 2011 with the remaining due to be finished by 2013. The four wharfs will boost Kaohsiung Harbour's container volume by at least 2 million TEUs (20-foot equivalent units).

Kaohsiung Harbour currently has five container terminals with a total of 23 wharves - three wharfs are 16 metres deep while the rest have an average depth of 14.5 metres.

Kaohsiung was the world's third-largest container port in the 1990s, but its ranking has been dropping in recent years because of expansions of neighboring ports and Taiwan's five-decade ban on direct shipping with China.

Some large foreign shipping lines have stopped calling at Kaohsiung, choosing instead to sail directly to Chinese ports and use shuttle vessels to fetch containers from Kaohsiung.

Currently, Kaohsiung is the world's seventh-largest container port after Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Busan and Rotterdam.

In 2007, Kaohsiung handled 9.8 million TEUs, up 4.7 per cent from 2006, the smallest growth, along with Rotterdam, among the world's top container ports.

Other major ports, especially those in China, registered 10- to 20-per-cent growth in 2007.