By Michael White
The GPA’s Focus 2020 long-term strategic development plan puts the Garden City Terminal, with two on-terminal Intermodal Container Transfer Facilities (ICTFs), at the epicenter of its plans to proactively increase the capacity of the port to handle the anticipated growth in container cargo moving across its docks over the next decade.
“About 20% of the cargo the port handles moves by rail and we expect that to increase to as much as 25% over the next five to ten years,” says John Wheeler, GPA’s Senior Director of Trade Development. “Shippers wanting to discharge their cargoes as near to inland markets a possible are seeing that Savannah’s rail connections give them a distinct advantage over moving their shipments through a West Coast port.”
That Savannah “advantage” is a key element in the supply chains of dozens of globally-branded shippers from Walmart and The Home Depot to Academy Sports and Target.
The anticipated widening of the Panama Canal and the increased use of the Suez Canal to move cargo from Southeast Asia to the U.S. are having a significant impact on shippers wanting to reach the 80% of American consumers that reside east of the line intersecting Chicago and Dallas. That, he says, makes Savannah “the head of the logistics funnel that moves cargo in a triangle from Chicago to Dallas and Atlanta and everywhere in between.”
In fact, Savannah is the fastest growing U.S. East Coast entry port for Southeast Asia-sourced cargo with the volume of containers moving inland through the port from Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam growing from 60,000 TEUs in 2000 to more than 220,000 in 2008.
“We know who drives the boats and we know who steers the boats and that’s the shippers who own the cargo,” says Wheeler. “We tie the whole package together by talking to the cargo owner, the ocean carriers and the rail carriers. We communicate with everyone that serves as a critical link in the supply chain because we want to make sure that it’s all working as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.”