What sank Port of Hong Kong’s claim to world’s shipping crown?
- Once the world’s busiest port, Hong Kong now trails Singapore and various mainland rivals
- Can it turn things around, or has this ship sailed?
The year was 1988. Fresh off his maiden voyage to Asia, Bjorn Hojgaard, then just a 20-year-old seaman, stepped onto the shores of Hong Kong – and it was the scent that hit him first.
“I remember Hong Kong for the smells because they were so foreign,” recalled Hojgaard, who is chief executive of Hong Kong-based ship-management firm Anglo-Eastern Group. “It was literally a fragrant harbour.”
So bustling was the Kwai Tsing Port, the ships that docked there even morphed into “markets” of their own, with locals going aboard and lining the hallways with their wares, selling anything from watches to T-shirts and toys.
Where it once drew the most container traffic in the early 2000s, the Port of Hong Kong has been steadily slipping down the ranks of the world’s top ports.
In 2018, the city fell two notches to seventh place, as ports like Guangzhou in mainland China as well as Busan in South Korea caught up. It looks set to be overtaken in 2019 by the Port of Qingdao, which moved more boxes than Hong Kong in the first 11 months of last year. Throughput at the Port of Hong Kong came up to 16.8 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) as of last November, down 6.2 per cent from a year ago, going by latest estimates from the Hong Kong Maritime and Port Board Secretariat.
