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PORT DEVELOPMENT
HONG KONG, the world's busiest container port, handled more than 11 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in 1994. This represented an increase of some 20 per cent from the previous year.
Port cargo forecasts published at the beginning of the year show that by the year 2011, there will be a demand for Hong Kong to handle 32 million TEUS a year. This is three times the current throughput and means handling one TEU every second, 24 hours-a-day, every day of the year.
To cope with this level of demand, the territory is planning to build a completely new container port on Lantau Island with twice the capacity of the present container port at Kwai Chung.
Building the port, on a series of artificial islands stretching southeast from Lantau, will be one of the world's biggest civil engineering projects.
The new port is vital not only for Hong Kong but for southern China, currently the fastest industrialising area in the world. More than 60 per cent of all cargo passing through Hong Kong's port is bound to, or from, China.
Despite the upgrading of Chinese port facilities, Hong Kong is likely to remain the hub port for the region well into the next century.
To complete new terminals to cope with the demand on time, facilities capable of handling the annual total throughput of, for example, Felixstowe, Britain's busiest container port, or Oakland, California, will need to be added each year for the next 16 years.
Like the existing container port, all the new terminals will essentially be built by private enterprise. Hong Kong is the only major port in the world not run by a port authority. All its container terminals have been financed and built, and are operated, by private enterprise. It is a system that has worked well to make Hong Kong not only the busiest, but one of the most efficient, ports in the world.
Port Development Strategy
Hong Kong was founded as a port to handle the China trade just over 150 years ago. Since then, it has flourished not only as a port, but as a bastion of laissez-faire economics. Its port has grown along with its own economy and that of China.
It became apparent in the mid-1980s that future growth would be on a scale not envisaged in the past. The need for future facilities would be so vast that careful co-ordination would
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