Seatrade-Maritime: Integration needed to capitalise on maritime opportunities in LatAm

Published by Seatrade-Maritime

The Latin American region and Panama are feeling the impact of an increasingly uncertain geopolitical environment on the maritime business, pushing the reconfiguration of supplier networks and supply chains.

“Today, supply chains compete against one another. The end customer does not buy a port or maritime transport. They buy reliability, visibility, speed and resilience across their entire logistics chain,” Maersk’s Managing Director Central America, Andean & Caribbean Sea Area, Efrain Osorio told the audience of the 11th Latin American Port Forum held in Panama.

Osorio pointed that “integration drives competitiveness, benefitting importers and exporters when shipping lines, port terminals, inland transport, warehousing and digital solutions operate as a single ecosystem with shorter dwell times, better inventory planning, lower total logistics costs, greater supply chain reliability and a smaller environmental footprint.”

While the current geopolitical landscape is creating volatility, changing trade patterns, disruptions in shipping routes and sometimes port congestion, Latin America has a unique opportunity to benefit from this situation, said the speakers.

“Shipping is resilience and those who do not adapt will miss the opportunity. This resilience helps us to move forward. Interaction amongst the ports is more efficient today. We are not competitors. Processes must be more streamlined and organised with new technologies and adaptation must be immediate and kept diversified,” commented William Elliott, president of Panama’s Evergreen’s Colon Container Terminal (CCT).

Osorio and Elliott concurred that however, to capitalise on this opportunity, much deeper integration is required between the authorities, the ports, the shipping companies, logistics operators and land infrastructure. “The key is to offer more diversified services with added value. Resilience is offering and that is what customers look for.”

“At CCT, our diversification has been in logistics, as we built a logistics park next to the terminal. We have seen recently more customers coming to Panama to transform products, and there is demand , quite a large demand,” added Elliott.

“Nearshoring, friendshoring, diversification of manufacturing are opportunities for commercial exchange in the region, and the supply chain has to go with this tendency,” said Osorio.

Will the future $8.5 billion investments plan for the maritime sector in the next decade, reshape Panama’s competitiveness and the transhipment activities in the region? But what to do for all those ports to compete between each other and with the other terminals in the region?

“As we are a transhipment hub, we need to be more efficient since our competition is outside,” said Enrique Piqueras, general manager of PSA-Panama. “We had made progress, but it requires better and more efficient co-ordination between government and the private sector.

“Governance is necessary. The sector cannot change strategy every five years [when a new government is elected].”