APM Terminals Wants In on Turkey’s Container Volume Boom

APM Terminals is looking into buying more ports in Turkey, trying to take advantage of the country’s rapid growth in container volumes, Bloomberg reports.

Container volumes are reportedly increasing at twice the country’s rate of the gross domestic product. In 2013, Turkey handled 8 million TEUs, with a capacity of around 12 million TEUs.

“We are definitely interested to have a port around Istanbul, in the Marmara region,” Mogens Wolf Larsen, managing director for APM’s Turkish unit, told Bloomberg in an interview. “We can also look at the Mediterranean coast between Mersin and Iskenderun.”

The Netherlands-based terminal operator is planning to put its container port in Aliaga peninsula into operation by the end of next year. APM Terminals will pay annual fees to adjacently located petrochemical producer Petkim Petrokimya Holding AS for the period of 28 years.

The two companies are planning to invest USD 450 million in the port projected to have an annual container handling capacity of 1.3 million TEUs, making it the country’s third largest port in Turkey, right after Mersin International Port and Marport.

On a front closer to home, the new APM Terminals Maasvlakte II container terminal has begun landside commercial operations with the opening of the truck gates. The 86 hectare (212 acre) terminal includes a 500-meter barge quay, 1,000-meter deep quay and an ondock rail terminal with four tracks of 750 meters.

Two barge quay cranes and two rail cranes are part of the landside investment in the 2.7 million TEU annual capacity deep-water terminal.

The terminal also features a dedicated barge terminal to efficiently handle 24-hour barge operations. The barge quay crane operators will operate within the crane cabs, as opposed to the eight, super-Post Panamax Ship-to-Shore (STS) cranes, which will be the world’s first remote-controlled terminal quay cranes.

The barge quay features a 10-meter depth – as compared with the deep-sea quay depth of 20 meters, capable of accommodating the largest vessels now in service in the global container ship fleet and future generations of ships. With the dedicated barge quay, a more reliable service can be offered to barge operators.

The first main line vessel will arrive in December and the frequency will increase during 2015 with the first regular service commencing February 2015.

In the port of Rotterdam, APM Terminals also operates the APM Terminals Rotterdam Maasvlakte I facility, one of the busiest within the company’s Global Terminal Network, handling 2.28 million TEUs in 2013.

World Maritime News Staff