Port of Singapore realizes less then 1% growth since January.
Container throughput at the port of Singapore was flat in the first three months of 2019, with only a marginal percentage increase compared to the same period last year. Singapore’s throughput in the first quarter of 2019 stood at 8,904 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU), which is a marginal 0.44 percent increase over the same period last year. The port recorded 2.99 million TEU in January; 2.74 million TEU in February and 3.13 million TEU in March. That appears to be pretty standard for Singapore; last year, the month with the lowest box throughput was February with 2.82 million TEU and the month with the highest throughput was May with 3.18 million TEU.
The average monthly throughput for the first three months of 2019 is just under 2.97 million TEU, which is marginally up by 2 percent from the average figure of 2.91 million TEU for the first three months of 2018. The monthly mean average for the 12 months of 2018 was 3.05 million TEU.
Port of Singapore still holds globe’s number two ranking.
To put these figures in context, the busiest port in the United States is Los Angeles, which recorded a box throughput of 9.5 million TEU in 2018. The Port of Long Beach in California had a box throughput 8.09 million TEU in 2018.
Singapore is one of the world’s busiest box ports by container throughput. In annual box-count lists, it typically takes the globe’s number two spot, behind Shanghai, China. Singapore has had three years of consecutive growth: 30.9 million TEU in 2016, 33.7 million TEU in 2017 and 36.6 million TEU in 2018. Singapore is not just a box port though.
Singapore reports 50.280 vessel calls in the first three months down by 5.3%
It handled 6.2 million metric tons of non-containerized general cargo in the first three months of 2019, which is up 2.4 percent on the 6.08 million metric tons recorded in the first three months of 2018. A metric ton is 2,204.6 U.S. pounds. The port handled 24.3 million metric tons of non-containerized conventional cargo in 2018.
The volume of non-oil bulk cargoes stood at 4.34 million tons in the first quarter of 2019, which is an increase of 2.8 percent compared with the first three months of 2018. Singapore handled 16.85 million tons of non-oil bulk cargoes in 2018.
22% of port calls in Singapore where cargo related.
There were 50,280 vessel calls at the port of Singapore in the first three months of 2019, which is down by 5.3 percent compared to the first quarter of 2018. Cargo-related calls accounted for 22 percent of all vessel calls in the first quarter of 2019, which was the single largest discrete reason for calling at Singapore. The next most popular reason for ships to call at Singapore was bunker fuel-related with 20 percent of all calls.
The third most popular identifiable reason to call at Singapore was for reasons related to supply, and that accounted for 14 percent of all ship calls in 2019’s first quarter. The vast majority of calls, 21,535 ship calls, were for “other” reasons. There was little change in the reasons for ships calls between the first quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019. In 2018, there were 208,925 port calls at Singapore.
Singapore has presently 4.470 vessels registered
Shipowners can choose which flag to fly on their ships. That is important for a variety of reasons and particularly because the law that applies on the ship is the law of the national registry. Singapore is also an internationally regarded ship registry. In the month of March 2019, preliminary data suggests that there were 4,472 ships flying the Singaporean flag and those vessels had a total gross tonnage of just under 93.08 million tons. Gross tonnage is a measure of space not weight.
It measures all the internal space of a vessel and is important in a variety of ways – for example, taxes and tolls are often levied on the gross tonnage of a ship. The mean average number of ships registered in Singapore over the first three months was 4,470 vessels, with an average total gross tonnage of 92.6 million gross tons.
