Pulses: Singapore and the next ten/twenty years
I put up Pulses article on the futuresgroup wordpress blog here. Some takeaways are …
Competition from other ports rising on intra-Asia trade – 8 of top 10 container ports inAsia. E.g Guangzhou and Shenzhen overtaking HK. Shift in trade patterns with sharp-rise in intra-Asian trade. This should benefit SGP due to strong feeder network, but due to low demand and oversupply of port facilities, this will lead to cost competition/price war which SGP would come out poorly.
New ports from new trade patterns – India and ME trade patterns rising, Sri Lanka’s Colombo port is a more natural transshipment hub than SGP. Increased China-US could see more mainline services going directly on transpacific trade, reducing transshipment through SGP.
Too much trade volume – Rising intra-Asia trade may be so high that container lines choose to serve ports with mainline services going directly from point to point in Asia, rather than through feeders as now. Long running hub-spoke vs distributed angst here. But add in China Shipping Lines hmmm…
Help regional neighbors to improve – this boosts volumes which in turn could feed into SGP. PSA has done this with terminals in Kolakata etc in India, Tianjin etc in China. But this is different from regional challengers BKK (air logistics), HK/Southern China (China hub). Recently Fedex has moved its hub from Subic in Philippines to Guangzhou, DHL is entrenched in HK. How do you balance the rise of challengers in giant markets China, Indochina with the stability/security etc SGP offers?
