Phnom Penh Autonomous Port (PPAP) saw a surge in demand from container ships last month after an upgrade added capacity to process and load shipping containers. Some 32,441 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) passed through the port in October, an increase of more than 57 percent compared with the same month last year.
A TEU is based on the volume of a 20-foot-long (6.1 metre) container, which can be easily transferred between different modes of transportation, such as ships, trains and trucks.
There was a 7.3 percent rise in cargo vessels last month. Cargoes and gas fuel demand was up 9.7 percent. There were no passengers as there were no boats to carry them.
For the first 10 months of the year container volume rose more than 19 percent, compared with the same period a year earlier, to 288,848 TEUs. Cargo vessels slipped 0.05 percent but cargoes and gas fuel were up nearly 5 percent. Again there were no passengers or passenger boats, compared with 9,733 passengers on 126 vessels in Jan-Oct 2020.
PPAP launched a new container terminal in September, upgrading its full capacity in handling containers to 400,000 TEUs per year.
Construction of the $18.4 million container terminal was started in 2019 and finished in mid-2021. It covers 2.75 hectares of land and is capable of handling 100,000 TEUs of containers per year.
In 2019 PPAP handled some 290,000 containers.
PPAP shares are traded on the main board of the Cambodia Securities Exchange. They ended Friday’s session 0.67 percent higher at 14,980 riels per share.
This article was first published in Khmer Times. All contents and images are copyright to their respective owners and sources.
