Waterline 60 port productivity and prices report show improvements still trending
Port productivity is still improving, though the rate of change is pretty slow for container haulage providers.
The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE) Waterline 60 report shows average truck turnaroundtimes increased by 1 per cent across the five main national container ports in July-December 2015.
Brisbane and Adelaide posted decreases of 5.1 per cent, while Sydney experienced an increase of 6.1 per cent.
Container turnaround times decreased 4.3 per cent in Brisbane, 1.4 per cent in Adelaide and 0.5 per cent in Fremantle.
The per cent of trucks backloaded shows the number of backloaded operations as a percentage of total vehicle booking system (VBS) trucks in all five ports.
During the period July-December 2016, the largest percentage of backloaded operations was in Adelaide at 22.9 per cent.
The share of backloaded operations grew in Brisbane from 9.5 to 11.9 per cent, in Fremantle from 11.1 to 11.9 per cent and in Sydney from 8.6 to 8.9 per cent, as compared with the period July-December 2015.
The total number of truck timeslots used in the five ports declined by 2.4 per cent in July-December 2016 compared to the same period in 2015.
In the same period, the number of truck slots available increased by 14.8 per cent. Usage of weekday night truck timeslots declined by 3 per cent across the five ports compared to the same period in 2015.
Meanwhile, the total number of twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) handled by stevedoresincreased by 1.8 per cent during July-December 2016, as compared with the same period in 2015.
The largest increases occurred at Brisbane (4.1 per cent) and Sydney (2.6 per cent), while there was a decline of 3.9 per cent at Adelaide.
Growth in annual TEU throughput at Australia’s container ports has declined to 1.6 per cent, while non-farm GDP growth was 1.9 per cent over the year to July-December 2016.
Waterline 60 includes two new indicators relating to empty container park operations: number of containers moved through empty container parks and number of TEU moved through empty container parks.
TEU moved through empty container parks declined 1.6 per cent, compared to the same period in 2015.
The biggest decline was in Sydney at 11 per cent, while the greatest increase was in Adelaide with 21.6 per cent.
BITRE advises that the truckand container turnaroundtimes have been revised in Waterline 60.
They are now computed on the basis of ‘gate in to last container loaded’, where the previous definition was ‘gate in to gate out’.
The historical series has been revised from March quarter 2011.
The full report can be found here.