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HONG KONG's Amsterdam Container Terminals (ACT), owned by Hutchison Port Holdings (HPH), is expected to lay off 70 of its 105 staff, and to sell four of its nine post-panamax quayside gantry cranes.
"ACT will keep sufficient a complement [staff and equipment] to allow it to operate as a small but mature deepsea container terminal," said a statement from HPH's Rotterdam powerhouse ECT.
The Amsterdam facility will continue to serve as an "extended gate" for ECT, involving the handling of barge-borne boxes for the north-west of the Netherlands, reports London's Containerisation International.
"The container transhipment industry in northern Europe is still far from recovered and features a growing overcapacity," the company added.
A year ago, bleak reports started to appear in the Hong Kong Shipping Gazette suggesting that Amsterdam would soon to disappear from the maritime container scene with the announcement that Grand Alliance ships from Hong Kong's OOCL, Germany's Hapag-Lloyd and Japan's NYK would no longer call, thus ending major container operations in the port.
Amsterdam traffic rose 10.2 per cent to 425,000 TEU in 2008, outpacing the growth of larger rivals like Antwerp, which grew just two per cent and Rotterdam where volume remained flat. But after that promising start, Amsterdam became a victim of the downturn and a victim of capacity-cutting carriers on Asia-Europe routes that chose to reduce calls and go to bigger ports with bigger ships.
The situation became so dire that HPH sacked its entire management team at its Ceres Paragon terminal in March, leaving only the group's operations manager in place. This came on the heels of new of the container traffic decline of 53 per cent to 200,000 TEU in 2009 from 425,000 TEU in 2008, a fall blamed mostly on the Grand Alliance quitting the port because of falling demand and its bigger vessels that could no longer reach the harbour through its shallow channels and narrow locks.
(Source:www.schednet.com)
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