Here’s why Singapore will fail to reclaim its crown as the world’s largest port

Shanghai will continue to dominate trade.

Singapore will stay stuck in second place in terms of the size of its global container handling facilities, according to a report by BMI Research.

Shanghai will remain as the world’s largest box port in the medium-term, after the city-state yielded its crown to to the Chinese facility in 2010.

“Despite an improving outlook for the port of Singapore, we nevertheless do not believe that the facility will manage to reclaim the number one position in terms of global container handling facilities over the medium term. For the port of Singapore to retain its position as the premier Asian transhipment hub and battle the port of Shanghai for first position, Singapore must continue to expand and keep up with shipping trends. The port has been slow to keep pace with the 'bigger is better' trend in the container box shipping sector, with the port not featuring on the route of the 18,000TEU capacity Triple E-Type, the first of which was launched launch by Maersk Line in July 2013. Hong Kong is the Asian transhipment point for this vessel,” BMI Research said.

BMI forecasts that from 2017 to 2019, the port of Singapore will see container throughput average y-o-y growth of 3.27% to reach 37mn TEUs, while tonnage throughput will record average annual gains of 3.1%, reaching 660.84mn tones by the end of 2016.

In terms of the container throughput outlook for the port of Singapore over the medium term, we forecast the port of Singapore's total throughput to grow by an annual average increase of 1.8% to reach a projected 37.0mn TEUs in 2019.

“Although we expect Shanghai to remain the largest port in terms of tonnage throughput, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal presents considerable upside potential to our forecasts for the port of Singapore. The TPP will further bolster the rapidly expanding maritime trade flows between Asia and Latin America, as well as reviving the transpacific trade route between North America and Asia.