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Saigon port puts difficulties for businesses, causing big losses
Congestion at ports in HCM City has become so regular that it has become an obsession of businesses. The current deadlock at Tan Cang Saigon, once again, is making enterprises miserable.
At Tan Cang Saigon (Saigon New Port), the volume of goods is down by 40% over last year. That’s reasonable, given that year over year imports and exports through HCM City decreased by 11 percent and 30 percent, respectively, in the first three months of the year. With the decreased volume of goods going through the port, it’s also reasonable to expect that the port’s chronic chronic congestion would ease.
If that’s the case at Tan Cang Saigon, it’s hard to see how the situation will ease throughout the city’s port complex. According to Director of Saigon Port Le Cong Minh, in the first four months of 2009, the port loaded and unloaded more than six million tones of cargo, an increase of 43 percent over the same period of 2008. In mid April alone, 50 ships docked at Saigon Port
Tied up by paperwork
Nguyen Ngoc Duc, Director of an HCM City import-export company, believes that the congestion at the port is not the result of too many goods, but because of the complicated procedures.
Tan Cang Saigon is considered the ‘elder brother’ of the container ports in HCM City. Together these make up 65 percent of the total capacity of the ports in the southern key economic zone, and 42% of the total capacity of the port system in the country.
Tran Van Tien, who owns an import-export company in HCM City, said that the Saigon Port management has set up many ‘abnormal’ fees, including Port State Control inspections, or PSC. This kind of fee, Tien said, is only applied at the ports which have a high level of ship visits.
According to Tien, the ships with the tonnage of over 20,000 tonnes have to pay anchorage charges of $5,000 a day. At other ports, ships have to wait five to seven days to get commodities loaded or unloaded. Meanwhile, at Saigon, Cat Lai and the Phuc Lam inland container ports, 15-20 days is a typical turnaround time, which means that the ship anchorage fee may reach $100,000. This has prompted ship owners to pass through the PSC fee to commodity owners to cover these expenses.
According to Director General Tran Van Pham of the Soc Trang Seafood Company, it costs $100 per tonne per day to store goods at ports. Besides, he has to pay $50 in PSC for every 20-foot container, and $100 for every $40-foot container.
Businesses are losing billions of dong
According to Duc, he is used to greasing palms at the ports. However, the level ofthese fees has become so high that it is unbearable for enterprises. Meanwhile, if enterprises do not pay bribes, their commodities will get stuck at ports. Therefore, they would rather ‘pay up.’
Duc said that if commodities get stalled for 15-20 days at ports, the total cost of different fees may rise to 30% of the commodities’ values.
Meanwhile, an executive of a food import company said that her company imports 300,000 tonnes of commodities a month, and incurs nearly 10 billion dong monthly in penalties when they cannot deliver in time.
Losing money isn’t the biggest problem for businesses. What they fear most is that they cannot make deliveries on schedule to partners, whom they then have to compensate and risk losing their good reputation.
Enterprises also complain that they not only have to pay ‘abnormal’ fees set by the ports, but also the fees set by foreign shipping agents.
A garment company executive said that in general, big mills have 200-300 containers a month going through ports, while smaller companies ship 50-100 containers. As such, on average, the tie-up at Saigon Port costs every garment firm from $5,000 to $30,000 per month.
Ca Hao
vietnamnet
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