Southampton braces itself for UK box port oversupply

New cranes and more flexible labour aim to boost customer service levels

DP WORLD Southampton believes customer service levels are key to maintaining market share in the face of oversupply in the UK container port industry.

The facility’s head of commercial, Aart Hille Ris Lambers, told Containerisation International that it had worked hard on improving service levels over the last few years to meet the challenge of new capacity coming on stream and flat demand growth.

He said DP World Southampton had changed its working culture with a more flexible labour arrangement and had invested in six new cranes and a new Navis terminal operating system to improve productivity.

“In the early 2000s we could manage 23 crane moves an hour but we were struggling to get more. Today the average across all ships is 28 moves per hour but bigger ships with big discharge goes over 30,” he said.

“We are trying to give a good service to our customers, not only ship-side but also land-side and rail-side. One of our best selling points is our rail connections. Roughly 36% of all cargo goes by rail, which is the highest in UK.”

He said that using Southampton’s rail services made economic sense for cargo travelling beyond Birmingham because of the port’s connection to the west coast main line, which runs to the north of the country. Its rail operations are not at full capacity at present and it has room to expand.

The port also offers a variety of road connections to Birmingham and beyond, he said.

“All of these things are the basic proposition we have in Southampton,” he said. “Other ports have other propositions, but let me put it this way, if they were completely compelling, all our customers would have already left us.”

Mr Hille Ris Lambers said that before the global financial crisis, UK container ports were struggling to cope with volumes, but that since then the situation had changed dramatically.

Growth has slowed and new capacity such as London Gateway, which is due to open later this year with initial capacity of 1.5m teu, is set to come on stream.

DP World Southampton also has a £150m ($226.2m) upgrade project, including opening a new berth, which will increase its capacity from 2.3m teu to 2.8m teu when it is completed in January next year.

One port contact said he expected the UK container port industry to be blighted by overcapacity for the next 10 years.

Mr Hille Ris Lambers said: “We are confident that we can keep our customers with the service we can give today but we can’t take anything for granted. It’s a competitive market.

“We are not the biggest port in the UK but our ambition is to be the best in terms of customer service.”