The Origin And Development Of Containers (V) —— Shipping Containers To Prosperity
Shipping Containers To Prosperity
In In the winter of 1965, the U.S. government launched an attack on Vietnam, the scale of the logistics of this battle is the largest of all the armed struggle in the United States, the solution to the problem of logistics transportation marked the arrival of the era of containerization.
Vietnam in 1965, from north to south across 700km, but only one deep-water port one Saigon, only a mostly non-functional railroad and an intermittent highway. There were no cranes or forklifts in the port, and all cargo was loaded and unloaded by hand. Ships with military cargo and U.S. relief supplies are competing for the only IO berths available, and once a ship docks, it takes days of parking before all the cargo is unloaded. "Saigon was a tomb." A senior naval officer at the time described it this way. Later, the army began to use "conex boxes," a kind of steel container that could transport weapons, boots and sort miscellaneous goods. In 1965 Christmas, Mclean came to Vietnam, after some inspection, he thought - containerization can solve many logistical problems in Vietnam, and in 1967 signed a contract to carry out container ship services. In the same year, Sealand also signed a contract worth 70 million dollars, including not only the service of containers, but also the installation of coastal cranes, trucks and chassis. Almost The largest natural seaport on the coast of Vietnam was turned into a large-scale container port. In November 1967, the American Oakland 685-foot container ship with 609 35-foot containers (equivalent to the cargo that could be transported by 10 general cargo ships) sailed for Vietnam. In Cam Ranh Bay, Sealand's high-level computer system used perforated cards to record every "war" declared a success. Mclean estimates that in 1967, shipping from the U.S. to Vietnam using a single container ship, including loading and unloading, would have cost half as much per ton as using a military cargo ship, not to mention the reduction in lost and damaged cargo.
The 1st decade of containerized ocean transportation development was in the United States. Containers obliterated thousands of jobs on the docks and fundamentally changed the geographic distribution of commercial development. The speed with which containers took over global trade routes shocked the world, and some of the world's largest port cities soon found their ports virtually disappearing, while inconsequential towns where no-name ports were located began to become centers of maritime trade.
Phase 1 of the container boom developed in the North Atlantic and Phase 2 in the Pacific. Japan was the fastest growing economy in the 1960s. In the late 1960's, the Japanese government built container terminals in the Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kobe areas. The first Japanese container ship sailed to the United States in September 1968, specializing in the transport of televisions and radios produced in Japanese factories. The Japanese government planned to containerize half of Japan's exports by 1971, with two large ships carrying 1,000 containers, and the first container ship arrived in Hong Kong in July 1969. The following year, Sealand started container service to Korea and Matson started a biweekly service to Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines. In 1972, Hong Kong's shipments of garment and plastic products and small electronics grew from 3 million tons in 1970 to 3.8 million tons. Taiwan's total import transactions grew from $1.4 billion in 1970 to $4.3 billion in 1973. billion dollars. In countries such as Singapore and Australia, the situation is equally promising. The development of international trade was so rapid that container transport turned from market stagnation to shortage, and from 1973, the wild increase in oil prices provided unexpected development opportunities for the maritime industry, which gave container ships capable of transporting more cargo to bring a greater price advantage than bulk carriers. In 1973 alone, the world containerized cargo increased by 40%.
This boom was maintained until 1974. In 1975, the world manufacturing exports fell for the first time in the post-war period, the maritime transport trade fell by 6%, and the container shipping industry was in recession because of the entry of a large number of competitors. Nevertheless, the revolutionary impact brought by the container will not fall. In the late 1970s, the number of container ships in the world increased dramatically, the volume of cargo transported in 1 year increased by 20%. In 1970, the total volume of container ship cargo 1.9 million t, in 1980 reached 10 million t (not counting the volume of cargo carried by ships dedicated to loading mixed containers and other cargo ships). In 1977 was a milestone for container shipping 1, container shipping opened a route between South Africa and Europe - the last route still using dry bulk carriers.
Since the 1980s, shipping operators gradually began to pursue bigger rather than more ships, while ports were expanding, the market for container transport was getting bigger and the cost of cargo transport was further reduced.
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