APM Terminals and Cearaportus are pouring $175 million into the northeast Brazilian Port of Pecem in the hopes of turning it into a regional east coast South America hub for mega-ships transiting the Panama Canal that ports in the region can’t handle.

JOC.com reports, the investments and such a hub so close to the Panama Canal and all-water services to Asia would be a massive boost to mango, melon and other Brazilian fruit shippers and allow Pecem, with its deep draft of 15.2 meters (49.9 feet) to handle mega-ships of up to 18,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units in capacity. Pecem could emerge as an option for shippers using ports all the way down the coast to Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires.

 APMT hopes the proximity of Pecem to the Panama Canal will make it a hub on the east coast of South America.

“Its location is also strategic for all the routes from Asia, which makes it an excellent choice to receive cargo and distribute goods by cabotage,” said Ricardo Arten, the managing director of APMT in Brazil.

APMT has been operating at Pecem, which is very popular with fruit shippers and is gradually taking cargo away from the port of Fortaleza 34 miles away, for more than 15 years.

The expansion of the Panama Canal, which can now handle 14,000-TEU ships with lengths of 366 meters, widths of 49 meters, and drafts of 15 meters, has created huge potential for Pecem to evolve into a major transshipment hub, Arten said.

Upgrades at Pecem include $150 million from Cearaportus, which owns the port and is owned by the state government of Ceara, for strengthening the quay at Pecem to handle mega-ships, while APMT has spent $25 million on new ship-to-shore gantry cranes with a reach of 22 containers across. The cranes have already arrived from China and APMT is currently assembling, trialing, and commissioning them, and they should be ready for operations by the end of August. APMT has also purchased reach stackers, terminal tractors and other port equipment and expects traffic to increase 20 percent over last year.

No other ports on the east coast of South American can handle such gargantuan ships as those at Pecem if container lines should choose to deploy those behemoths to the trade. Only Suape, near Recife, and Sepetiba, near Rio de Janeiro, would have the draft to handle such large ships, but they lack the equipment necessary to do so.

Santos can handle mega-ships of 10,000 TEUs, and possibly more if not fully laden, but its dredging problems and occasional draft restrictions are well-documented, which could put carriers off regular deployments of larger mega-ships to South America’s busiest container port. However, given its proximity to Brazil’s commercial capital of Sao Paulo, it is also unlikely that mega-ship calls at Santos will stop altogether, particularly as ships continue to increase in size on trades worldwide.

“Depending on the cascade of vessels (sending larger ships to smaller trades as ships on the busiest trade lanes grow in size) to other trades, such as South America, Pecem can be the solution to immediately address the current deficiency of Brazilian port infrastructure,” said Arten. “Nearly all the traditional ports suffer from navigation restrictions for vessels with a deeper draft than 14 meters.”

Contact Rob Ward at [email protected].

Rob Ward, Brazil Special Correspondent


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