One of World’s Busiest Ports : Shipping Still Central to Singapore

The President Jackson came alongside a wharf here at 7 a.m., inbound from Semarang, Indonesia. By 3 p.m., it had discharged its cargo, picked up another and was under way for Cochin, India.

“When a ship isn’t moving, it’s losing money,” shipping agents say.

The port of Singapore, one of the world’s busiest, moves them out. On any day, about 600 ships are in port here, moored in the anchorages or tied up alongside the more than nine miles of berths.

In the western reaches of the port, tankers from the Middle East are pumping crude into the refineries of Shell, Esso, British Petroleum, Caltex, Mobil and Singapore Petroleum.

Storage Facilitated

At the Tanjong Pagar container terminal, Mitsubishi and Hitachi cranes swing the big steel boxes onto the wharf for storage in warehouses--called godowns in Southeast Asia--or for shipment to the merchants and factories of this bustling city-state.

At the Keppel wharves, ships discharge grain, liquefied rubber latex, vegetable oil and other bulk and general cargoes. Elsewhere in the port, coastal freighters and tramps bring in goods from nearby countries.

By one measure, the port of Singapore is tops in the world. In 1984, ships calling here totaled 527.5 million gross registered tons (a calculation of cargo capacity), with Rotterdam second at 421 million and Yokohama third at 350 million.

But shipping capacity does not always indicate the amount of cargo carried. Officials of the Port of Singapore Authority say Rotterdam is the top cargo-handler.

(Another source puts Kobe, Japan, first, Rotterdam second and Singapore third. According to the Container News, a shipping trade journal published in Atlanta, Kobe handled 21.3 million metric tons of cargo in 1983, the latest year for which the publication has figures. Rotterdam followed with 18.9 million tons that year, edging Singapore, with 18.8 million.)

In the anchorages and elsewhere in the port, the panorama of hulls gives a sense of the variety and range of the business here.

At anchor one day this month rode the Sea Freeze II, Tanjung Johor and a heavily laden freighter of the Balt-Orient Line. Alongside the wharves were the container ship Palembang out of Jakarta, the Thai Binh from Haiphong, a British cable-layer and a mother ship for a Soviet fishing fleet, the sort often suspected of carrying intelligence gear as well as fish.

At the dock where the President Jackson, a ship of the Oakland-based American President Lines, had berthed, containers stacked five high bore the names Evergreen, ScanDutch, Nedlloyd and Messageries Maritimes.

Moving among the big ships in the anchorages, the open, wide-bellied transfer boats called lighters, those owned by Chinese bearing good-luck dragon’s eyes on their bows, picked up cargoes for shipment ashore.

Water taxis and bumboats ferried crewmen back and forth. Soviet Bloc sailors, sweating in the humidity here 80 miles north of the Equator, lugged cartons of Technics stereo gear and Sharp television sets back to their ships.

Including the oceangoing ships and the harbor workboats, there were about 3,000 craft in the port.

Super-Clean Port

Looking to shore, the masts, wharves and cranes rim the skyscrapers of the city, like a foreshortened view of downtown Los Angeles with San Pedro at its ankles.

The super-clean character of Singapore runs right to the water’s edge. The docks and warehouse areas are spotless and the waters exceptionally clean. There are heavy fines for spillages, and little workboats with screens on their bows sweep paper and other debris from the harbor.

In 1819, when Sir Stamford Raffles established a trading post here for the British East India Co., the scene was far different, but Raffles had a vision.

He proclaimed that Singapore (from singapura, Sanskrit for lion town) would be the “pride and emporium” of the East.

Today, a ship enters or leaves the port every 10 minutes. Things were slower in the early days.

On Feb. 1, 1861, an advertisement of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. noted that a P&O; ship “with the mails for Penang, Galle, India, Aden, Mauritius, Suez and Europe may be expected on or about the 6th and 21st . . . of each month.”

Ship repairs were then, as now, a benefit of stopping in Singapore. In another 1861 pitch, the Patent Slip Dock & Co. “beg to intimate that they are prepared to recopper and execute all descriptions of repairs to ships, in the most efficient manner, under the supervision of European shipwrights.”

Its location and its natural deep-water harbor have been the keys to Singapore’s success as a port from the start. It began as an entrepot port, one that took in the natural resources of the Malay Peninsula and the East Indies--the outer islands of present-day Indonesia can be seen from Singapore harbor--for transshipment by oceangoing vessels to China and India.

Raffles declared it a free-trade zone, meaning that any shipper could store goods at the port without paying customs duties, just storage costs and port service fees. Independent Singapore has continued the free-trade status of the port, although a large proportion of the cargo is no longer entrepot but outgoing goods manufactured in Singapore, petroleum products refined there and incoming cargoes for Singapore’s industry and commerce.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 gave the port a big boost. Steamships from Europe no longer had to around Africa en route to East Asia, so the shortest route to the South China Sea ran through the Malacca and Singapore straits rather than the longer swing through the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java.

Two years later, in 1871, a submarine cable was laid between Singapore and India, opening up direct telegraphic communications with Europe.

State-of-the-art communications, along with the first-rate port and the availability of Singapore’s financial houses, continue to provide the full package of facilities that shippers want.

“I don’t think there’s another port in the region to equal it,” said Francis Woo, the Singapore-based operations manager for American President Lines, one of about 500 shipping lines that operate here. “The tariffs are competitive,” Woo said.

T. Kannu, a spokesman for the Port of Singapore Authority, said port officials consider the other big Southeast Asian ports “complementary, not competitive.” But some of the others, like Malaysia’s Port Kelang, Taiwan’s Kaohsiung, as well as Hong Kong and Jakarta, are looking for larger bites of regional and world trade.

In June, the port of Singapore revised its tariffs for port and terminal services for container traffic, and officials say the costs now run a bit less than the Taiwanese and Malaysian ports and far lower than Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Except for the highly computerized container traffic, business declined here in 1984.

The shipbuilding companies have been hurt by the decline in the oil business. A decade ago, “oilies” were a fixture in Singapore, which became a sort of Houston East as offshore drilling swept the region. They and the business they brought are largely gone now.

Cargo Volume Off 13.7%

General and bulk cargoes have also been adversely affected by the recession of the early 1980s and the stuttering recovery.

For the first five months of 1985, cargoes handled here decreased by 13.7%.

But the shipping lines continue to make Singapore a priority call. Fast and thorough service--and, as always, location--remain the big selling points. Wong Hung Kim, general manager of the port, said the main complaints cited in a recent survey of shipping lines and agents were “inadequacy of parking, canteen and toilet facilities.”

The port authority has been able to reduce the size of its labor force through increased productivity. Singapore’s once-tough labor unions have been largely tamed by the government, and work stoppages at the port are only a memory.

Goods may be stored here while the seller awaits a better market price, but no operator wants his ships to be “laid down” in port unless it is in for repairs or replenishment of supplies or fuel.

So it usually means a short stay in Singapore: General cargo ships can be turned around in an average of 45 to 50 hours, and container ships in eight to nine.

Then it’s out to sea again.