2006-06-23 10:08:08globalist
貨運中心移入中國導致香港運輸地位大為滑落，香港港口陷危機IHT
中國東南沿海地區的貨品過去一直是運到香港港口對外輸出，但是，近年由於中國沿海港口不斷增加、設施改善、服務提升，因此，愈來愈多的轉運貨品就直接從最接近產地的港口輸出，不必再經香港。廠商說，所有香港能提供的，現在中國都有了。一家大廠已將一半的貨品輸出轉至靠近產地的港口。香港的運輸、流通產業，已經面臨１８４１年英國開港以來最嚴重的危機。
（台灣要靠中國為腹地做亞洲營運中心，可行嗎？）
Mainland rivals push Hong Kong port into crisis
By Patrick L. Smith International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 2006
When C. Russell Whittle took over as managing director for sourcing at Targus early last year, he found that the maker of computer cases and accessories handled the bulk of its cargo from southern China just as most other manufacturers did: It shipped its products from Kwai Chung, Hong Kong’s large, efficient container port.
Hong Kong’s share of Targus’s cargo volume has now been slashed to a little more than half, and Whittle is not done yet. He intends to keep moving his business to ports closer to the factories that make Targus products in Guangdong Province.
”We’ve made a conscious effort to shift from Hong Kong to Yantian,” Whittle said, referring to the largest of several ports in the region of Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong and is home to Shenzhen and other thriving manufacturing centers. ”A year ago we were at the forward edge of a trend; now we’re in the middle of the pack. More and more companies are going this route. Everything that can be done in Hong Kong can now be done in China.”
The shipping and logistics industries in Hong Kong, long the territory’s very raison d’être, face what many executives and experts say is a challenge that could prove as serious as any since the British established a port here in 1841.
Southern China’s lower costs, improving services at its ports, shorter distances between factories and wharves and increasing port calls are all eroding Kwai Chung’s competitiveness.
Experts who have studied shifts in cargo traffic say Hong Kong is fast approaching a point beyond which business lost to Guangdong’s expanding ports will not return, even if the government heeds highly unusual calls in the industry to intervene to enable Hong Kong to compete.
”We’re asking how desperate this situation is and getting very pessimistic answers,” said Evan Auyang, a consultant at McKinsey, which is studying the cargo industry in the Pearl River Delta.
At a minimum, according to experts who are in the industry or who study it, Hong Kong’s shipping industry will change as its relative importance in the Pearl River Delta region declines. Pessimists say Hong Kong will become ”a fringe port,” as the chairman of one shipper who requested anonymity put it.
Manufacturing migrated northward to Shenzhen and elsewhere in Guangdong in the late 1980s. With the development of ports along the Pearl River, shipping activity can now follow the factories.
”This is a structural change, and no one can stop it,” said James Wang, the head of transport studies at Hong Kong University. ”Hong Kong used to be the entrepôt, the gateway to China. Now China has its own gateways.”
Yantian and other container-handling ports in the Pearl River Delta are little more than a decade old. More are under construction. They now claim more than 40 percent of container traffic in the delta - business that was almost entirely Hong Kong’s until the late 1990s.
The most immediate cause of this shift is cost. Trucking charges and the fees levied by vessels calling at Kwai Chung mean that shipping a container from Hong Kong costs roughly $300 more than from mainland ports. Hong Kong’s longstanding advantages - fast turnarounds at the wharves, sophisticated logistics capabilities, efficient banking - no longer justify its ranking among the world’s priciest ports.
As companies like Targus are discovering, mainland ports now provide roughly comparable services. Until recently, two factors appear to have lulled Hong Kong into complacency. For one, explosive economic growth in southern China produced large yearly increases in cargo volumes, leaving Kwai Chung and its rivals to share an ever larger pie. For another, substantial declines in direct shipments were masked by increases in transshipping - essentially vessel-to- vessel transfers, a low-value activity that brings relatively little economic benefit.
The wake-up call came late last year, when a steady fall in direct shipments - factory-to-container-to-truck-to-cargo hold - turned into a plunge. Hong Kong is now losing direct cargo traffic from southern China at a rate of 9 percent a year, triple the pace until mid-2005.
Apparently for the first time, shippers, traders and the industries dependent upon them, which account for a quarter of Hong Kong’s employment and almost $40 billion in economic output, are facing the long-term implications of a process that began when China first built deep-water container ports near Hong Kong in the mid-1990s. McKinsey estimates that a third of this economic activity is at risk.
Hong Kong’s throughput grew 3.1 percent last year to 22.6 million TEUs, an industry measure using 20-foot equivalent units. Volume in the mainland’s Pearl River ports was 16.2 million TEUs in 2005 and is growing consistently at rates of 15 percent to 20 percent.
”Hong Kong’s competitiveness is eroding,” said Frank Jensen, general manager for marketing and logistics at Modern Terminals, one of the city’s largest terminal operators.
Freight forwarders, manufacturers and industry analysts say the shift in activity to mainland ports could accelerate significantly in the coming years. Modern Terminals and its main rival here, Hutchison Port Holdings, are expanding in southern China; neither is investing significantly in Hong Kong’s waterfront.
The immediate challenge, all sides say, is to equalize costs so that Hong Kong can compete for direct cargo shipments. Hong Kong has already negotiated with Guangdong to relax some of the many regulations and restrictions imposed on Hong Kong truckers; it is now trying to eliminate bottlenecks at Chinese customs barriers.
But officials here have left two central issues unresolved. To make Hong Kong cost-competitive, the city will have to allow mainland truckers to operate here or let Hong Kong companies hire mainland drivers - moves that government officials say would threaten jobs.
Equally, Hong Kong has failed to negotiate lower terminal-handling charges with shipping lines serving Kwai Chung. These charges, set by international shipping conferences, account for a third of the difference between costs in Hong Kong and southern China.
Even if there is progress on these issues, executives and experts say, Hong Kong will need to rely more on the high- end cargo that justifies Kwai Chung’s costs and on its ability to stay ahead of the mainland by offering advanced services like container bundling, packaging and multicountry cargo consolidation.
Meanwhile, a growing sense of urgency is producing uncharacteristic calls among many in the industry for Hong Kong to abandon laissez-faire policies. To some, these calls are historic.
”We want the government involved,” said Sonny Ho, executive director of the Hong Kong Shippers’ Council. ”A lot of jobs depend on this.”
（台灣要靠中國為腹地做亞洲營運中心，可行嗎？）
Mainland rivals push Hong Kong port into crisis
By Patrick L. Smith International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 2006
When C. Russell Whittle took over as managing director for sourcing at Targus early last year, he found that the maker of computer cases and accessories handled the bulk of its cargo from southern China just as most other manufacturers did: It shipped its products from Kwai Chung, Hong Kong’s large, efficient container port.
Hong Kong’s share of Targus’s cargo volume has now been slashed to a little more than half, and Whittle is not done yet. He intends to keep moving his business to ports closer to the factories that make Targus products in Guangdong Province.
”We’ve made a conscious effort to shift from Hong Kong to Yantian,” Whittle said, referring to the largest of several ports in the region of Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong and is home to Shenzhen and other thriving manufacturing centers. ”A year ago we were at the forward edge of a trend; now we’re in the middle of the pack. More and more companies are going this route. Everything that can be done in Hong Kong can now be done in China.”
The shipping and logistics industries in Hong Kong, long the territory’s very raison d’être, face what many executives and experts say is a challenge that could prove as serious as any since the British established a port here in 1841.
Southern China’s lower costs, improving services at its ports, shorter distances between factories and wharves and increasing port calls are all eroding Kwai Chung’s competitiveness.
Experts who have studied shifts in cargo traffic say Hong Kong is fast approaching a point beyond which business lost to Guangdong’s expanding ports will not return, even if the government heeds highly unusual calls in the industry to intervene to enable Hong Kong to compete.
”We’re asking how desperate this situation is and getting very pessimistic answers,” said Evan Auyang, a consultant at McKinsey, which is studying the cargo industry in the Pearl River Delta.
At a minimum, according to experts who are in the industry or who study it, Hong Kong’s shipping industry will change as its relative importance in the Pearl River Delta region declines. Pessimists say Hong Kong will become ”a fringe port,” as the chairman of one shipper who requested anonymity put it.
Manufacturing migrated northward to Shenzhen and elsewhere in Guangdong in the late 1980s. With the development of ports along the Pearl River, shipping activity can now follow the factories.
”This is a structural change, and no one can stop it,” said James Wang, the head of transport studies at Hong Kong University. ”Hong Kong used to be the entrepôt, the gateway to China. Now China has its own gateways.”
Yantian and other container-handling ports in the Pearl River Delta are little more than a decade old. More are under construction. They now claim more than 40 percent of container traffic in the delta - business that was almost entirely Hong Kong’s until the late 1990s.
The most immediate cause of this shift is cost. Trucking charges and the fees levied by vessels calling at Kwai Chung mean that shipping a container from Hong Kong costs roughly $300 more than from mainland ports. Hong Kong’s longstanding advantages - fast turnarounds at the wharves, sophisticated logistics capabilities, efficient banking - no longer justify its ranking among the world’s priciest ports.
As companies like Targus are discovering, mainland ports now provide roughly comparable services. Until recently, two factors appear to have lulled Hong Kong into complacency. For one, explosive economic growth in southern China produced large yearly increases in cargo volumes, leaving Kwai Chung and its rivals to share an ever larger pie. For another, substantial declines in direct shipments were masked by increases in transshipping - essentially vessel-to- vessel transfers, a low-value activity that brings relatively little economic benefit.
The wake-up call came late last year, when a steady fall in direct shipments - factory-to-container-to-truck-to-cargo hold - turned into a plunge. Hong Kong is now losing direct cargo traffic from southern China at a rate of 9 percent a year, triple the pace until mid-2005.
Apparently for the first time, shippers, traders and the industries dependent upon them, which account for a quarter of Hong Kong’s employment and almost $40 billion in economic output, are facing the long-term implications of a process that began when China first built deep-water container ports near Hong Kong in the mid-1990s. McKinsey estimates that a third of this economic activity is at risk.
Hong Kong’s throughput grew 3.1 percent last year to 22.6 million TEUs, an industry measure using 20-foot equivalent units. Volume in the mainland’s Pearl River ports was 16.2 million TEUs in 2005 and is growing consistently at rates of 15 percent to 20 percent.
”Hong Kong’s competitiveness is eroding,” said Frank Jensen, general manager for marketing and logistics at Modern Terminals, one of the city’s largest terminal operators.
Freight forwarders, manufacturers and industry analysts say the shift in activity to mainland ports could accelerate significantly in the coming years. Modern Terminals and its main rival here, Hutchison Port Holdings, are expanding in southern China; neither is investing significantly in Hong Kong’s waterfront.
The immediate challenge, all sides say, is to equalize costs so that Hong Kong can compete for direct cargo shipments. Hong Kong has already negotiated with Guangdong to relax some of the many regulations and restrictions imposed on Hong Kong truckers; it is now trying to eliminate bottlenecks at Chinese customs barriers.
But officials here have left two central issues unresolved. To make Hong Kong cost-competitive, the city will have to allow mainland truckers to operate here or let Hong Kong companies hire mainland drivers - moves that government officials say would threaten jobs.
Equally, Hong Kong has failed to negotiate lower terminal-handling charges with shipping lines serving Kwai Chung. These charges, set by international shipping conferences, account for a third of the difference between costs in Hong Kong and southern China.
Even if there is progress on these issues, executives and experts say, Hong Kong will need to rely more on the high- end cargo that justifies Kwai Chung’s costs and on its ability to stay ahead of the mainland by offering advanced services like container bundling, packaging and multicountry cargo consolidation.
Meanwhile, a growing sense of urgency is producing uncharacteristic calls among many in the industry for Hong Kong to abandon laissez-faire policies. To some, these calls are historic.
”We want the government involved,” said Sonny Ho, executive director of the Hong Kong Shippers’ Council. ”A lot of jobs depend on this.”
上一篇：拉丁美洲的選擇？(紐時)