Subic port container freight station

SBMA Chairman Roberto Garcia said in a news briefing here on Monday that the planned facility will be put up by the International Container Terminal Services Inc. (ICTSI), operator of Subic’s New Container Terminal (NCT).

Garcia said the CFS will be another innovation on top of other SBMA initiatives, like one-stop-shop processing and an aggressive marketing program that were designed to further cement Subic’s stature as a competitive shipping port.

“This way, there’ll be no more warehousing as the goods could be loaded directly into delivery trucks,” Garcia added. “That means there will be no downtime, too.”

A CFS is basically a facility where goods are prepared for transport to their next destination. In the case of exports, the goods are packed and consolidated into containers, while in the case of imports, these are “devanned” or deconsolidated from containers.

Garcia announced the planned CFS project as he reported on Subic’s continuing growth as a seaport.

He said that early this month, Subic marked the unloading of the 100,000th cargo container for this year, which came from Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

“Last year we recorded just 77,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units),” Garcia recalled. “But having reached the 100,000th mark in November, we are well on our way to hit 120,000 TEUs this year,” Garcia said.

The SBMA official added that the China South International Barter Center (SIBC), one of the biggest online sellers in the world, is also proposing to make Subic a transhipment hub for its Asian shipping operations.

Garcia said earlier that the SBMA has been successful so far in marketing Subic as an alternative port to Manila because it is the only port in Luzon with a one-stop shop for cargo processing.

He pointed out that Subic now has seven shipping lines unloading and taking in cargo on a regular basis after President Aquino signed Executive Order 172 that designated Subic as an alternative port to Manila.