“By the year 2020, we intend to have 35 terminals worldwide in our portfolio and to be handling 18 million containers per year. This is not a dream,” said Peter Richards, Gulftainer’s ceo, said at a press conference to unveil its “new vision” in Sharjah this week. “It is a mission that we will accomplish.”
The company expects 2013 container throughput to increase 75% to 7m teu with the addition to its portfolio this year of new terminals in Saudi Arabia at Jeddah and Jubail, through the acquisition of 51% of Gulf Stevedoring Contracting Company. "The acquisition makes Gulftainer the largest port operator in the Middle East by number of terminals operated in the region," Gulftainer's new website said after a brand relaunch.
Gulftainer also operates terminals at Umm Qasr, Iraq and Recife, Brazil, and announced a terminal operation at Ust-Luga, 110 km west of St. Petersburg, in 2011. A year later it was awarded a concession to manage and operate the port in Tripoli Libya. In 2008, it launched Momentum Logistics, a third-party logistics company.
“Sharjah is the birthplace of containerisation in the Middle East,” said Richards, a reference to the establishment in 1976 of Gulftainer through Port Khalid, Sharjah, now a facility of 500,000 teu. Its terminals have seen average growth of 12% in the past five years, he said. With a capacity of 3m teu, Khorfakkan is its largest facility. “We were the fastest growing transhipment hub in the world in 2012,” Richards said.
Company officials hinted that the company’s future expansion would not necessarily involve competing for assets against the “Big Four” global terminal operators, PSA International, Hutchison Port Holdings, APM Terminals and DP World, and that the acquisition of terminal assets well under 1m teu by capacity would be on the company’s radar in coming years, in regions as diverse as Africa, India, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, South America, the Caribbean and North America.
| Gulftainer Throughput 1999-2013
| ||
| Year
| Throughput
| % Change
|
| 1999
| 1,079,168
| -
|
| 2000
| 1,116,140
| 3.4%
|
| 2001
| 1,200,176
| 7.5%
|
| 2002
| 1,391,646
| 16.0%
|
| 2003
| 1,601,087
| 15.0%
|
| 2004
| 2,003,620
| 25.1%
|
| 2005
| 2,157,899
| 7.7%
|
| 2006
| 2,012,840
| -6.7%
|
| 2007
| 2,173,867
| 8.0%
|
| 2008
| 2,501,829
| 15.1%
|
| 2009
| 2,750,285
| 9.9%
|
| 2010
| 3,022,524
| 9.9%
|
| 2011
| 3,229,929
| 6.9%
|
| 2012
| 3,996,248
| 23.7%
|
| 2013e
| 7,000,000
| 75.2%
|
| Source: Gulftainer Company
| ||
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. Seatrade, a trading name of Informa Markets (UK) Limited. Add Seatrade Maritime News to your Google News feed.
