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(Below is the speech delivered by Mr. Christian R. Gonzalez, Asia Pacific Head of the International Container Terminal Services, Inc. He was one of the speakers in “Improving Turnaround Time,” the third session of the BusinessWorld Economic Forum.)
FROM A TURNAROUND time point of view, which is what we’re really meant to talk about today, with ports you need to look at it from two different angles.
One is the big existing international ports that the Philippines already has in Manila and another is from the seriously inadequate ports or pieces of land by water, actually it’s what they are, in our provincial areas.
So looking at what we have now from an international port point of view in Manila, there are two significant issues related to turnaround time.
The first is how to actually move the goods around without disrupting the lives of the people who live in the cities. And the second is how to address one of the biggest hindrances to quick turnaround time in logistics which is corruption, which by the way exist in every country around the world so it’s not anything unique to us here.
When you look at how to move the goods in and out of what frankly are fairly efficient ports in Manila, we go to the issue of roads and how to manage the supply and demand. Unfortunately, a lot of the projects that were spoken about earlier are gonna take years to build, we saw numbers up there like 2024 and 2025 and 2022.
But what are we to do today? The population is growing. The population is becoming richer. As much as we want to avoid it, people are buying cars. How do we move goods in and out of the ports, which aren’t gonna move, and make them more efficient without disrupting all your commutes to and from your work and the commutes of your children, and the commutes of your family.
The way to do it is to actually look at, or spend a lot of time looking at the roads and seeing when the regulatory bodies have kind of forced the general public to use them and when the regulatory bodies have forced trade to use them.
And if you actually studied that and looked at that, you’ll realize that the trucks are only using the road five to seven hours a day. And you realize when you study Russia that most of them are all on the roads at the same time. So from a freight perspective, we looked at systems, we looked at things in other countries, truck appointment systems, for example, to spread that across the entire 24 hours, seven days a week, to ensure that we can get to 2024 when all the roads are done without disrupting our daily lives. That’s actually been very successful and I think it would be very interesting to talk about later.
CURBING CORRUPTION VIA AUTOMATION
The second thing about existing international ports is corruption. We all know that if you need to go get a signature, and you need to pass money under the table and all of that, you know, it takes a lot of time. It’s very easy to talk about idealism and say “okay we’re gonna stamp out corruption” but this is not a one- or two-year thing. This is a multi-generational ideology.