Container traffic in Mindanao terminal on the upswing

VILLANUEVA, Misamis Oriental — Container traffic is finally picking up at the Mindanao Container Terminal (MCT) with international shipping lines serving Northern Mindanao slowly moving their business to the multibillion-peso facility.

The Phividec Industrial Authority (PIA), which is supervising the MCT, said it is now receiving regular port calls from three shipping lines, namely Maersk-Filipinas, NMC Container Lines, and Hamburg-Sud.

Maersk calls on the port every Wednesday, while NMC ships drop in every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Hamburg-Sud vessels dock only once every two months, but will soon be joined by ships of the Lorenzo Container Shipping Corp. (Lorcon), which will be here twice a week.

So far, the NMC has been largely contributing to container traffic in the MCT, its vessels regularly transporting domestic cargo from the MCT to Cebu and Manila.

PIA, according to sources, is negotiating with American President Lines (APL), probably the largest volume shipper among the foreign shipping lines now calling on the region. APL primarily serves Del Monte Philippines Inc., which has its own port at its cannery in Barangay Bugo here.

The MCT has been identified as one of the key infrastructure projects that would give a big boost to Mindanao’s trade potentials.

With a rated capacity of only 1.8 million metric tons (MT), the Cagayan de Oro base port in Macabalan reportedly breached its maximum capacity in 2002 when its cargo throughput reached 2.79 million MT.

The MCT was conceived to fill the lack of an efficient cargo handling facility with its state-of-the-art facilities and cargo handling equipment, capable of unloading one container van in about 2.5 minutes compared to 10 minutes in an ordinary port.

It was exclusively designed for fully containerized and semi-containerized domestic and foreign vessels. It has an annual capacity of 270,000 TEUs for its first phase.

With the MCT, cargo can be efficiently shipped to and from the Phividec Industrial Estate here, as well as to and from other key growth centers in Mindanao and elsewhere in the Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines-East Asia Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA) or in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Japan Bank for International Cooperation funded bulk (85 percent) of the MCT’s $85.34-million (P3.34-billion) cost, with the PIA shouldering the balance.