Watch Out, Singapore – Jakarta’s Port Is Getting Ready to Steal Your Business

Singapore has long dominated transshipment in Southeast Asia. In fact, Singapore currently takes care of close to 1/7 of the world’s transshipments, making it the world’s busiest transshipment hub.

Transshipment is when goods are shipped to an intermediate destination before being sent to the final destination. So right now, Singapore is the transit place for almost 1/7 of the world’s goods that don’t go directly from source to destination.

Indonesia has now started to ask itself why Jakarta’s port Tanjung Priok couldn’t take some of that business away from Singapore – especially for Indonesian goods that currently go to Singapore for forwarding to a final destination.

Indonesia, a country made up of more than 17,000 islands, has several large ports. Tanjung Priok in Jakarta is the busiest and most advanced port in Indonesia and is currently being expanded to facilitate both today’s largest container ships and ships of the future that are expected to be even larger.

The expansion project began in 2013 but will take many years to complete. It seems that Indonesia hopes to chip away at some of Singapore’s business bit by bit.

For the time being, Indonesian goods that have previously gone to Singapore for transshipment will now go Tanjung Priok. But Singapore doesn’t have a lot to worry about.

In 2015, Singapore handled 30.59 million units of containers.

Unfortunately, Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok handled only 5.4 million units during the same time period.

It doesn’t sound like Singapore has to worry about Tanjung Priok too much yet.