The Hamburg Port Authority (HPA) will keep carrying out its stabilizing port fee strategy. The cap will not be raised regardless of the strong growth in especially large container ships.
Ships will pay port fees only for a size of up to about 110,000 gross tonnage, which roughly corresponds to a container ship with a capacity of 11,000 TEUs.
With the port fee adjustment effective from 1 January 2012, the HPA wants to take account of some of the general cost increases of the past three years. The HPA has not increased port fees since 2009 and some port fee tariffs were lowered by up to 10 per cent in 2010. Now, port fees are to go up by 3.5% what accounts for an adjustment still below the inflation rate since 2009.
The HPA is going to change the structure of the schedule of port fees and charges in 2012 and digital data collection will be introduced to calculate port fees. As of summer, ships’ handling volumes will be important for calculating port fees.
At the same time Hamburg will be one of the first ports worldwide to implement an electronic port fee declaration submission procedure.
Hamburg will become one of the first ports worldwide to implement an electronic port fee declaration submission procedure.
A handling component will be introduced for the first time in the summer next year what will significantly reduce the port fee for ships with lower handling volumes. So far, port fees have been calculated according to a ship size.
An electronic port fee declaration, planned to be introduced in the summer of 2012, will enable the required declaration to be electronically transmitted directly to the HPA from already existing digital shipping company databases or the database of Dakosy, the port’s communication system.
It will then be possible to electronically transmit to the HPA the required declaration directly from already existing digital shipping company databases or the database of Dakosy, the port’s communication system.
Hamburg is now one of the first ports in the world to offer this new service.
[mappress]
World Maritime News Staff, December 21, 2011