Singapore’s new mega-port is open for mega storage

Singapore’s new mega-port is just months away from full operations, but it has opened its storage area early to help alleviate the supply chain bottlenecks plaguing container shipping. Congestion has caused ships to arrive late, resulting in logjams of containers in major ports around the globe.
Ship arrivals at Singapore are now 7.5 days late, on average, after schedule reliability fell to an all-time low of 33.6% in August, although this has since improved to 40%.
Senior minister of state for transport Chee Hong Tat said that following the Ever Given grounding, a ship which skipped a port call in the Persian Gulf came to Singapore, where it unloaded 2,700 containers originally bound for the Gulf. The containers were stored before being reloaded onto ships sailing to the intended destination.
Chee said, “In doing so, [port operator] PSA enabled the shipping line to skip a port and catch up on its schedule, after a two-week diversion around the Cape of Good Hope.”