(TAIPEI/HONG KONG) AP Moller-Maersk plans to slash about half its container handling capacity in Taiwan's Kaohsiung, Asia's No 6 port.
 
The move will be the latest blow to a harbour that has been losing ground steadily to South Korea and China.

The Kaohsiung Harbour Bureau confirmed yesterday a newspaper report that Maersk, Kaohsiung's largest foreign operator, intends to give up berths 118 and 119, two of the four it operates in the harbour, when their leases expire in October.

The move by the operator of the world's largest container shipping fleet is expected to further hurt Kaohsiung's declining position as one of Asia's top ports.

The 143-year-old harbour has been losing ground to fast growing rivals across the Strait in China, with the global container shipping industry under pressure from a slowing world economy and rising fuel prices.

But the bureau hopes to convince Maersk to at least move some of its capacity to a berth adjacent to the two berths that will remain following Maersk's departure, arguing that it will help the company cut costs.

'We are in talks to have them move to berth 75 and relocate the existing operator, South Korea's Hyundai, to 118 and 119,' said Huang Kuo Ying, deputy director-general of the Kaohsiung Harbour Bureau.

'The talks are scheduled to be concluded around August,' Mr Huang told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Maersk was not immediately available for comment.

Berth 118 and 119 have a combined capacity of 900,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) a year, while berth 75 could move more than 500,000 TEUs if it worked alongside Maersk's berth 76 and 77, which can move 1 million TEUs a year. Mr Huang conceded that Maersk's throughput in Kaohsiung declined last year after the company moved some of its volume to terminals in China's Xiamen port, across the Taiwan Strait. 'Since the company also has terminal investments in Xiamen, its demand here is not as big as before,' he added.

Throughput growth in Kaohsiung slowed to 3 per cent year on year in the first half of 2008, from about 5 per cent to 10.26 million TEUs for the whole of 2007.

That could see the port fall out of the ranking of the world's 10 busiest container ports.

Kaohsiung had already slid two places to become the world's No 8 in 2007, surpassed by Rotterdam and Dubai. -- Reuters