Original subtitles

Shipping is a global industry

that quite literally propels our economy.

It carries about 90%

of the world's trade worth $13 trillion.

Close to 2 billion tons

of manufactured goods, raw materials,

and produce are shipped across the high seas every year.

There are approximately 100,000 ships

in active service in the world.

Kept afloat by more than a million seafarers

manning a massive merchant fleet.

These things are huge, the size of four football pitches.

Cargo carriers, tankers,

and most significant, containers ships ply

the ocean's invisible highways,

delivering 90% of everything we consume.

The majority of the global trade is shipped at some point.

Owned by tycoons, ravaged by typhoons,

plagued by piracy and plunder.

People working in very dangerous conditions.

This is the story of a remarkable industry

that can no longer slip under the radar.

(upbeat music)

(water splashing)

"Shipping the World."

(wind howling)

(thunder roaring)

(upbeat music)

[Narrator] The primary workplace

for the commercial shipping industry

is fairly evenly split.

One and a half million employees spend

their days toiling on the open ocean,

while 2 million labor on land.

(upbeat music)

It's a vital part of maritime

and sustainable development overall.

At sea you have captains,

engineers,

stewards,

boatswains, and deckhands.

(upbeat music)

Portside,

harbor masters,

stevedores,

marine pilots,

traffic controllers, and all manner of white collar workers.

(upbeat music)

There are 100s of different jobs in the industry,

and those who fill each role

form the most cosmopolitan workforce in the world.

Servicing 4,936 ports

in 196 countries around the globe.

(upbeat music)

Not all ports equal.

Some ports are smaller than others in terms of

their ability to handle the actual volume of goods.

But the key metric here is the draft of the port.

The deeper the water alongside a dock

that's designed to on and off load containers,

the larger the vessel that can service.

You have to have those large drafts

to handle these large ships.

(soft music)

As containers ships

have steadily increased in size

the infrastructure servicing those vessels

has naturally had to follow suit.

Ships are not getting that much longer,

but they are getting bigger

to carry the additional capacity.

So boats have to build cranes

that are physically much bigger.

As the global population grows,

so too does the volume of cargo

that needs to be shipped around the planet.

So no great surprise that China now has seven

of the 10 largest ports in the world.

The busiest world port is Shanghai

in 2018, handled 42 million TEU

To put that in perspective,

Australia has 106 ports

that collectively handle around 8 million containers a year.

Moving around $850 million worth of trade

every day.

The value of trade in and out of Shanghai alone

exceeds $1 trillion a year.

That's five times the whole of Australia.

It is a mega port in every sense of the word.

For as long as ships have sailed the high seas,

they have been bustling docks and keys

places where merchant vessels could discharge

or load cargo destined for distance shores.

In the earliest of times ports were located on riverbanks

or in bays where conditions were invariably calm.

But occasionally the ancients constructed artificial harbor

is to facilitate maritime trade.

Portis on the Tyrrhenian coast,

was reputably one of the largest

commissioned around 46 A.D.

to supplement the sea port of Ostia.

(upbeat music)

Portus functioned as a maritime hub for nearly 500 years

and is considered by many historians to be one

of the Roman empire's greatest engineering achievements.

Because it was so vital to the whole way

that the Roman empire was organized

is about the connection within the empire,

but also externally to places beyond.

It was located north of the mouth

of the Tiber river,

29 kilometers from Ostia.

As the ships got bigger and bigger

and actually the port to Ostia began to infill with sediment

that was being transported out of the Tiger river itself.

That became a need for a greater port,

something maybe a little bit further away.

They connected it to Ostia via a canal,

and they also connected it

to the river Tiber itself via a canal as well.

So you could have that connection between Rome

and the river system

and also with the sea for the big ships coming in as well.

Although Portus no longer exists

archeologists well-versed

in the use of geophysical mapping tools

and computer modeling

have been able to determine his proportions.

Following an expansion in 103 A.D.

they believe the artificial harbor covered

an area more than 100 times the size of a sports field.

It could host as many as 350 ships at a time

and included a hexagonal basin surrounded

by great column warehouses and a palace.

It's not just about

areas to bring your ship in,

but it's all the infrastructure

that goes with it at this point.

Warehouses and ship shares and granaries

and imperial palazzo where the administration was done,

when we look at the evidence

for the organization of mooring

that happened in that Trajan basin, you have more inposts,

more in rings and numbers and columns.

It was a real administrative,

big administrative duty.

There's so many ships,

you've got 100 of ships coming in at any time.

And it's really not just an area to shelter the ships,

there were military facilities as well,

and

really just huge, huge superstructure

that was involved with this port.

Archeologists we're also able

to get a sense of the size of the ships

that were being used at the time

based on the draft our depth of the harbor.

So you have the Trajan basin

around eight meters draught that could take really big ships

that were coming in.

And then slightly smaller

potentially so you don't have to

draft going into the Trajan basin.

And then traded goods and materials, ceramics,

the grain would be offloaded into the stores

might be uploaded onto smaller ships,

which could then travel through the canals to Austria

or up into Rome itself.

Because of the sediment coming up out of the Tiber

and going north of that Italian coast,

Portus is now three kilometers in shore.

And what's really fascinating is that

it's no longer a seaport, but it's an airport.

Italy's largest in fact,

the Leonardo de Vinci International.

It's look like these places which were selected

for being centers of connectivity in the ancient past

are still the same importance

as still sense of connectivity today.

Still have where people coming in and going out.

Is still the main port the main hub for Rome.

Even though this remarkable site

is now serviced by 747 and A380s

it retains a great deal of his cosmopolitan charisma,

but little evidence of his once quite seedy periphery.

And it really is the stars and modern ports.

And it's really interesting because these areas are both

integral to society, but they're also slightly liminal.

(upbeat music)

You still look at port cities today

and you get the slightly fringe areas around the port

is often the areas where you have prostitution

or gambling and things like that.

Things which has seemed to be outside the norms of society.

You often find them around port cities

in the areas of the port.

It is essentially a very lonely life at sea,

despite all the tales of grand adventure and romance.

So little wonder ports act as magnets

for the world's oldest profession.

Providing seafarers on surely

with merit opportunities to alleviate home sickness

and desire.

A major trading harbor since the middle ages,

Amsterdam makes no secret of his salacious port history,

complete with hookers and hashish.

Indeed it openly flaunts it to this day.

(upbeat music)

As globalization continues to expand

the importance of ports intensifies.

You look at so many major cities around

the world, they're port cities.

They're the place where trade has grown up historically,

and they're the place where wealth

and economic activity is carried out.

The Red Light District of Amsterdam

with this cannabis cafes and ruffels contributes $3 billion

to the national economy every year.

Exports from the modern port that now engulfs

the old city canals,

bring in 460 billion.

Modern ports have become fast

and foremost logistical linchpins

that keep the whole shipping industry on track.

And of course the business of trade in motion.

So port is the maritime hub,

of which you load goods for global trade time.

And this is the bit where the ship interfaces

with the manufacturing hubs of the world.

It's a place where you have specialized facilities

to safely more ships and enable the cargo and people

to be moved on and off in an efficient manner.

(upbeat music)

All ports are essentially places

where international production

and global distribution networks connect,

but how they function depends largely

on the nature of their cargo.

There is no one size fits all policy.

Well, there's all sorts of ports.

There are container ports,

there ports that handle the dry bulk cargos

like iron ore and coal and grain

and of course an (mumbles)

like crude oil and chemicals,

but there are also passenger ports, small ports,

large ports, many ports combine all of those activities,

the right having facilities all sorts of different cargoes

and passengers as well.

So there's a huge spectrum of ports.

If you look at the design of a container terminal,

you'll find you know it's got two interfaces,

There is a key sight area where the board interacts

with the ship

and it'll have the equipment

which will be designed to minimize the time

that the ship spends in port.

On the other side, it also has the hinterland operation area

where it will be interacting with trains

and trucks and large operators and the like.

And somewhere in the middle would be the cargo

that is stored because effectively these days,

ports decouple the ship side operation

with the land side operation

so that you know one operation

is not held up by say to delay that hookers

on the other side.

There is a complicated supply chain

distribution pattern behind every single port.

And the success of report is not just dependent

on its ability to handle ships,

but also its ability to handle

the landside movement of the cargo.

In the past, ports dominated the center

of cities or other cities grew up around their ports.

In many cases, historically,

they are the reason why the city exists.

(soft music)

You see traditional port cities like Hamburg, Rotterdam,

where the ports are an integral part of the city,

you can't miss it, it's there for everybody to see.

And they continue to be part

of the lifeblood of those cities.

The newer the port however,

the more likely it is to be located well away

from the CBD in suburbs.

It has changed to some extent these days

because of the growth in ship size,

which has meant that the facilities for handling ships

in many of the older traditional ports have had

to migrate downstream towards deeper water.

There has been a kind of dissociation between port activity

and the city in many cases in traditional port cities.

You look at Jebel Ali and Dubai,

the whole of the city effectively has been designed

in different zones and the port

was very specifically designed

to be out of town and is, you know, some way out of Dubai,

but it's still very much at the epicenter of their economy.

As trade grows the economic fortunes

of poor cities such as Dubai expand

new jobs are created,

living standards rise.

But if trade slows

the economy invariably contracts,

it is often difficult to tell which comes first,

a sluggish economy or a downturn in trade.

It's a bit like the chicken and the egg.

But either way in this industry, the end result is the same.

Your best laid plans for expansion gets scrambled.

In 2016, lower oil prices affected economic growth

in the Middle East,

forcing the delay of a $1.6 billion upgrade

that would have allowed the port of Jebel Ali

to handle far more cargo.

A move that would have helped to stimulate the economy.

Dubai sits at the crossroads of Eastern

and Western shipping routes.

So Jebel Ali functions as a gateway port for the region

and a major transshipment hub.

Many of the goods and containers that come in

are destined for local consumption.

But most boxes are uploaded onto other ships

that will ultimately carry that cargo on to other ports.

So if you want an analogy for it,

it's like getting on the train

and wanting to go from A to B

but you change a midpoint because you have to get

on another line to get to where you're going to go.

Efficiency is the name of the game

and trends shipment hubs,

and delays the bane of their existence.

Transshipment hubs have

to be minimal deviation

from the main trade routes.

They have to offer deep water

and they have to offer high levels of productivity

and efficiency because they're handling

so many more services.

And the connection between them is critical

to keep the surfaces on schedule.

All the major container ports

operate 24 hours a day,

certainly in terms of ship handling

in terms of truck handling on the land side,

is usually more of a long day, Monday to Friday

because that fits in with the nature

of the ultimate deliveries to retail outlets

and distribution centers.

(upbeat music )

The more streamlined and automated the process,

the more desirable the hub.

An Interport competition has become

just as fierce of battle

as that wage between the shipping lines themselves,

where everyone's struggling for the lion's share

of the global business.

10 Years ago, you'd be looking at Rotterdam

or many of the European ports being the largest throughput

of containers in the world.

Now it is very dominated by China.

Port authorities rest

on their laurels at their peril.

If you don't handle the ship well,

there's another port just down the coast

that would love to do it.

(upbeat music)

The key ports dotted around the world today,

are the ones that have moved with the times,

expanding physically

to accommodate the larger container ships

and digitally to take care of logistics.

Clearly they've developed the infrastructure

in line with developments at sea.

So the ports have got bigger.

The berths have got deeper.

The cranes have gotten bigger and more efficient.

And the general running of the ports

has got much, much more efficient

in terms of turnaround times and so on to make sure

that these vessels are kept in port

for the least amount of time possible before

they continue on their journeys.

In the past, everything portside

was done manually.

The loading of the ship

and the discharge of the import containers

was controlled by what we call sequence sheets.

These were actually a handwritten sheets of paper showing

the stack position of the export container

and the storage position in the ship where it was to go.

Pre containerization shipping was very manual very slow.

It didn't happen in the standardized way

that you see it now.

It was an expensive endeavor getting cargo

on and off a ship at port.

It's all computerized now.

So you've got very, very little labor

involved with the oven the bit today

where it arrives in the wafe.

That's all automatic

now that not even man is driving a truck anymore.

You know, so we've seen a hell of a change.

and it's so fast now.

Before the advent of containers,

ports were set up to deal with breakable cargo.

Breakable cargo of course, is the individual package.

Breakable could be anything,

boxes, crates, coffee, and sex basically anything

that is not fitted into a container.

Extortion and theft where rife.

We had to pay the wolfies embarrassment money,

an extra payment on top of their wages

to handle toilet pens,

to wrapped up in slack wooden boxes,

but they still wanted embarrassment money for handling them.

The unfortunate side about

breakable cargo

was that it was so prime to pilferage.

Everybody stole a little bit,

but by the time that you were finished

a little bit plus a little bit, wasn't caught a lot.

It's difficult to secure a cargo of whiskey.

And it's one of the things that containerization

really changed because when you put things into a container,

you close the door and you lock it.

Insurance costs fell by around 90%

because the whiskey bottles stayed within

the container rather than being removed from boxes,

somewhere along the supply chain.

The staffing costs within ports

pre-containerization were phenomenal,

and the problem was it was a irregular

because standardization brought in this efficiency.

This economies of scale things could be speeded up.

Things could be regularized in terms of the operations.

Prior to that, you didn't know what was coming

you didn't know how big it was going to be

you didn't know how many people you're going to need.

It was expensive, it was cumbersome, it was awkward.

and it was very slow.

The casual workforce in docks varied

from country to country.

Some places were more unionized than others,

But it was essentially a casual system

because the

people that you needed each day

didn't have to be particularly skilled.

They just had to be fit and strong and willing to work.

When the industry started to change

and it became more sophisticated

and the equipment became more expensive

and the skills became higher,

then port operators started to realize, well,

we can't rely on casual people,

we need loyal, regular, permanent people.

The unions representing dock workers

at the time feared that containerization

would lead to job losses.

A threat that they would not take passively.

Through, a tremendous demarcation disputes.

And once this demarcation dispute, everything stops.

It was disputes and strikes

it was a few ships went over to America were turned away by

the longshoreman there.

So the reach of the union movement is not national

it's international.

Striking has always been a powerful tool

in the negotiations of work conditions on the docks.

On behalf of you wishes

on behalf of the policy which came from the politics

Loud and proud giving power to the people.

(mumbles)

Using the leverage

of their indispensable skills to reach agreement

with governing bodies and to get back to work

and to keep trade flowing.

We the strike committee are recommending

all our men back to work as of (mumbles)

tomorrow morning, Wednesday.

Not all strikes have resolved so easily

and unions have always been ready to fight for

what they believe in.

Over 83 days in 1934,

more than 12,000 longshoreman on the west coast of the

United States walked out of the ports

to negotiate pay and working conditions.

The tension reached it's peak on what became known

as Bloody Thursday.

In an attempt to reopen the port.

Police attempted to disperse the crowd with tear gas

and mounted officers.

The strikers responded with rocks.

The confrontation turned deadly when police fired shotguns

and revolvers at violent strikers.

Two men lost their lives.

Containerization was a threat to jobs stability.

However, dockers in London in 1972,

weren't fighting against it.

Dockers walked out in protest of how containerization

was being implemented in actively negotiated

for designated zones where organized labor

would take on container handling.

After refusing to stop picketing a container depot

five shop stewards were arrested

and sent to the infamous Pentonville prison.

The incarceration of the five saw 35,000 workers

immediately walk off the job.

The Pentonville five inspired a wave

of increased strike action.

And by the time they were released within the week,

over 250,000 workers had walked off the job

and the country was in an unofficial national strike.

The release of Sharp Stewart is seen

as a powerful example of the collective strength

of the working class.

♪ Good fellow ♪

♪ For they are jolly good fellow ♪

After the dust had settled,

those who were prepared to adapt and up-skill

found themselves more gainfully employed.

The role of people working in ports has changed hugely

and from even 30 years ago,

when containerization was more in its infancy

and being adopt worker was primarily about physical work,

about lifting things with your hands or with hooks

about moving cargo around

and dragging stuff physically.

Now, of course, we have containerization where

it's much more about the equipment

and very heavy and impressive equipment

like gantry cranes to use to load and unload the ships.

And driving those is closer to being something

like a gamer really.

It requires people who've got good hand-eye coordination

and can manipulate fire screen.

So it's a hugely different kind of person that's needed

to work in ports these days, compared to the old days.

Two port based roles that haven't changed

very much over the years

are those of the tugboat captain and local maritime pilot.

The timeout is a flooding battering rain.

If you didn't have tuck coats,

the port would basically ground to a halt.

An oil tanker that might spend 14 days at sea crossing

an ocean needs to be good at going in straight lines

and when it gets to port, you can use a tug.

Tug boats struggles to maneuver ships into port

at the request of the pilot.

The pilot he tells the tug boat where he wants him.

And he does that on the basis of the tugs ability.

The service local maritime pilots provide

is a little like valet parking,

only a great deal slower.

The biggest ships in today's commercial fleet

can take several hours to berth

Ships were assisted with bow thrusters and stern thrusters

thrusters that can create a force laterally sideways

to the ship to help it move on and off of a berth.

But international law requires the assistance of tax.

That's really from a safety point of view.

As many as four tugs may be required

to help bring a big ship alongside a key.

The number of soft boat

and the size of the top boat

is determined by the features of the port.

Should have a port with a narrow navigation channel

or a strong current

and in both cases you would probably need both more powerful

and in general, more top-ups

to navigate those circumstances.

Typically tags today,

you've got about 60 to 80 ton of bullet pool.

That's a lot of push and pull,

but all the tugs that are built now are all Z-pellers

as many times.

A Z-Peller enables a tugboat

to turn on the spot without using a radar.

It allows the vessel to change direction and position

with precision.

Stopping quickly with minimal disruption,

to the propeller efficiency.

They improve the maneuverability and performance

of a tugboat.

A fitting match for their highly skilled crew.

While several ports are experimenting

with advanced docking technologies,

such as magnetic or mechanical systems,

most still rely on old fashioned ropes

to facilitate mooring.

Their advantages is obvious,

as soon as tides and currents shift,

they can flex and stretch

with the mood of the sea.

And of course the changing draft of a ship as it is loaded

or discharged of his cargo.

The heaviest container ships need as many

as a dozen mooring lines tied to bullets on the dock.

Their attention is controlled by computers or deckhands,

depending on the level of automation present on the ship.

Almost as soon as a container ship berths,

dock workers swing into action.

You have your dock workers,

and then you have your sort of probably operational managers

and the operational managers will be overseeing

what the dock workers do.

Key crane operators are highly trained

as are rail mounted gantry cranes,

where that the cranes that you see on key.

So you have to be a highly trained and highly skilled

to be able to use one of those efficiently and safely.

With all the heavy lifting borne

by giant mechanical arms,

fewer stevedores are required to work the ships.

Because it's about mechanization.

It's about automation in some places.

So it's a completely different,

more capital intensive industry compared

to the old labor intensive industry that it used to be.

One of the more complex dockside jobs involves

the actual stacking of containers for export.

It's a very complicated logistical parcel

that's taken care of by what we call storage planners.

So very experienced people that actually decide

container by container, where it is placed on board the ship

to make sure that it is accessible

at the right point in time.

This is extremely important

for the last thing anyone wants to discover

down the track when they're unloading boxes

for transshipment is the containers.

their port requires languishing at the bottom of a stack.

We have software to help these stores planners

with this very complicated logistical puzzle making sure

that we plan the ship as efficiently as possible.

Minimizing the number of times the individual container

is moved during the voyage.

You cannot plan your way completely out of it,

but you need to minimize it.

A combination of software and very experienced people

do just that.

pre-computers planners must've felt

like they were confronting a giant game of Jenga

with the odds against them, just as precariously stacked

as the actual boxes.

Because the actual storage

just worked out by master mariners

who knew about the trim,

which is the forward and after movement

and the listing from side to side.

So all that had to be calculated

so that the

cargo would be stored safely.

There was less complexity around

the stacking of imported containers,

but just as many challenges.

In the early days, there were a lot of setbacks.

There were mechanical problems,

the cranes would break down sometimes

and other industrial disputes,

which was inevitable at the beginning of a new industry.

As dock operations continued to modernize,

the time ships needed to spend in port

was drastically reduced.

A fact that pleased the owners

and managers of the shipping lines,

but few of the old seafarers who worked for them.

Instead of being in port for a couple of weeks

and getting up to all sorts of mischief,

you were only in port for a very short period.

So you can get up to much mischief.

You can get to do anything, it's just work, work, work,

so as I (mumbles) awake and to get nighttime in port.

And the port said, you do go to a hideously expensive.

You know.

So it's totally changed.

Totally changed.

As container ships grew larger,

the ports they service expanded,

forcing dockside technologies to evolve.

This invariably included the upgrading

and upscaling of cranes.

Ships are not getting that much longer,

but they are getting bigger to carry

the additional capacity.

So boats have to build cranes that have

there that are physically much bigger.

And I've certainly grown a great deal in size

because the ships are growing a great deal in size.

And for some of them are a lot wider

than the early ones of 1969.

But in principle, I think it must be the same.

In 1969,

a yellow painted gantry crane constructed

to service a ship building operation

in Belfast Northern Ireland

was so huge.

It was nicknamed Goliath.

Five years later, Samson appeared on the skyline

standing 96 in 106 meters tall,

they became true icons of the working class city.

Both were designed by Krupp (mumbles)

a renowned German engineering firm.

But Goliath was constructed on site by the owners

of the shipyard, Harland and Wolff.

Each crane has a span of 140 meters

and can safely lift 840 tons,

five times the weight of a house.

Goliath and Samson, were two of the biggest cranes

and service for decades,

but even they were eventually usurped.

The largest are now manufactured and assembled in China,

then shipped in one gigantic piece.

ZPMC offers a full service of building the cranes

and delivering them to your port on their own ships,

They are fully constructed.

They are rolled slowly onto the ship and the ship sails

to wherever the port is that is buying the cranes.

In recent years, ZPMC has risen

to become the largest supplier

of container handling cranes in the world

with a market share in excess of 50%.

If you can say any concern

that's somewhere in the world,

they have a big long boom, which goes out across the ship.

And the gantry travels out along the length of the boom

to wherever it's got to get to on the ship.

Some of the most impressive of ZPMCS ship to shore cranes

weighing in at 2000 tons of piece

grace the docks of DP world's London Gateway.

London Gateway is a new container terminal river Thames

opened about five years ago.

The first major new container terminal facility

in the UK for about 30 years.

And it's obviously very new

in terms of its technology as well.

The gateways key cranes

are massive

towering like McConnell giants,

some 130 meters above the workplace.

And they're future-proofed arms can extend

beyond the width of the largest container ships

in the world's merchant fleet today.

Semi-automated,

they are among the most advanced gantry cranes

in the industry.

There's also a lot more technology in them

in terms of helping the driver

to operate those cranes,

to latch onto the containers,

to move them swiftly on and off

there is a lot of IT support in that.

So much so that now in a number

of new container terminals around the world,

the crane driver is not coming to the crane anymore.

He's sitting in an office, maybe at one kilometer away,

driving the crane from a bank of screens.

They're integrated with a terminal operating system

that keeps track of the boxes throughout the terminal.

So it's a far more sophisticated to process overall.

To speed up the loading or unloading

of any given ship

port authority simply add more cranes into the mix.

Typically operators and we owning

to do something like 25

to 30 moves per crane per hour.

If you multiply that through five or six cranes,

you're looking at something like 150 moves per hour

across the ship to get the kind of turnaround

that is expected.

Five or six cranes is about the optimum.

If you go too far beyond that,

you start to encounter congestion problems on the key,

because you have so many cranes working and dropping boxes

onto the key that getting those boxes away from the cranes

to the yard becomes a real congestion issue.

The gantry cranes

at the London Gateway lift containers from ship to shore.

Once they've been placed on the key,

they're moved out of the way by Straddle Carriers,

armed with hydraulic lifts.

From their automatic yard cranes rigged

with 3D laser scanners stack the boxes ready

for road transportation.

At the yard operation is entirely automated

no human involvement.

The jury is still out,

whether some of these driverless cranes aren't actually

going to be better than crane reserve as a driver on it.

The advantage of it is because

there's no driver in there they can go faster

24/7 no lunch breaks

or smokos or a whole lot of things like that.

In terms of infrastructure and cutting edge technology,

the London Gateway is incredibly impressive.

But it isn't the largest Seaport in Europe by a long shot

That honor belongs to Rotterdam.

Rotterdam is a port in the Netherlands.

It's what we call a European main port,

so it's handling the largest container ships

in the global fleet.

And it's predominantly handling vessels coming in from Asia.

From 1962 until 2004,

Rotterdam was the busiest port in the world

is still ranks a respectable 12th.

In 2018,

it handled

14.4 million

TEU

Stretching over 40 kilometers,

Rotterdam has five ports and three distribution parks

sprawling over an area that's 105 kilometers square.

The number of consumers in his hinterland

is in excess of 40 million.

Rotterdam is such a big hub

the mainline ships come in cargoes discharged,

and then often it's put onto feeders

to go elsewhere in Europe.

So someone like Rotterdam can be handling cargo

that is final destination will be in Scandinavia

and the Baltics,

maybe in the UK,

and then also moving England via road and rail

down into other central European countries.

Several seawood extensions to the port

have been made over the years.

With new docks in harbor basins added

to facilitate the growth of trade.

They had to reclaim the land from the sea

so they will have dredged

and then they will have reclaimed the land

by building up piles on the seabed

and then paving over it to create the key

and then to create the terminal behind it.

The latest development

in Rotterdam's burgeoning port

is Maasvlakte 2.

Maasvlakte 2 was the huge

investment that the port Rotterdam made

into expanding its capacity.

It includes 2000 hectares of reclaimed land

with space, a wind farm, and a gas power plant

to contain a terminals and additional facilities

for bulk cargo carriers.

I think the project is about 3 million Euro,

so it's only a substantial amount of money.

They needed the capacity.

However, it's probably not been as successful

as they probably hoped.

When it comes to thriving economies

and truly gargantuan ports.

There's just no stopping the red dragon.

The fire-breathing industrial behemoth, China.

The whole Chinese port range

has seen tremendous growth

in the last 10 to 12 years.

They really dominate in terms of the volume

of tea users we put at 20 foot equivalent units going

in and out of these ports and it really is just

an indicative marker of quite how dominant China has become

in terms of globalized seaborne trade.

China's meteoric rise,

superseded the U.S.

as the world's largest trading nation in 2012.

They own the largest number of vessels

in the global merchant fleet.

And their seaborne trade

is now worth around $4 trillion per year.

The busiest port in the world at the moment is Shanghai,

It's risen up the rankings quite considerably.

It's a whole development has been rapid and it has been fast

and it has been compounded by the boom in Chinese exports.

In 2018, it handled 42 million TEU.

Shanghai is literally China's flagship.

The head of the dragon former leader

Xi Jin Ping envisaged.

When he set China's commercial revolution in motion.

The port is barely recognizable from the 1990s,

let alone the days when it was used as a treaty port.

Established by the British in 1842,

after the first Opium War

an armed conflict that arose

when China tried to suppress the importation

of the drug by foreign traders.

It's rapid expansion in recent years

is largely due to the $18 billion construction

of Yangshan,

the biggest deep water port in the world,

which opened in 2005.

It's 30 kilometers into the ocean essentially

sitting in a group of islands

because if they wanted the biggest deep water port

and the old port of Shanghai is not a deep water port.

The Terminal is also the world's largest

in terms of automation,

increasing the port's handling efficiency

while significantly reducing its carbon footprint.

Needless to say,

the machinery it uses is all manufactured in China.

That degree of specialization,

you wouldn't find easily elsewhere.

So they're supplying worldwide port infrastructure.

The Yangshan deep water port connects

to the mainland by the bridge of Donghai

also completed in 2005.

One of the longest cross sea bridges in the world.

It's an engineering miracle to put

a bridge through 30 kilometers of sea.

The total area of the three major working zones

that now comprise the port of Shanghai

is marginally less than that of America's Grand Canyon,

just shy of 3,620

square kilometers.

And it harbors the world's fastest growing economy.

If China remains strong

then the Chinese ports remain strong.

If China sees some flux,

then the Chinese ports will see flux

and it's directly related.

If the likes of Vietnam and Indonesia

and other Southeast Asian countries invest in infrastructure

in terms of production, then they may well take some share.

The success of all ports

even the mega ones

is inextricably linked to the economy.

So upturns and downturns in productivity

are as inevitable as shifts in the tide.

It is neither love nor money that makes the world go round.

Rather the business of trade

facilitated by an industry

that has become so essential to all of our lives.

It can no longer slip under the radar.

(upbeat music)