Technical Report No. 8 PORT AND SHIPPING

4 DISCUSSIONS ON KEY PLANNING ISSUES
4.1 Assessment of Existing Port Capacity
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Vietnam National Transport Strategy Study (VITRANSS)
Technical Report No. 8
Shipping and Ports
Several types of ports are handling general cargo. Ports managed by the MOT
usually handle public cargo while private ports serve limited users. In this section
the capacity of the 89 ports is analyzed.
The total capacity of general ports in 1998 is 36.2 million tons – 6.6 million tons in
northern ports, 7.2 million tons in central ports and 21.2 million tons in southern
ports. In the same year, general cargo volume handled by these ports is
estimated at 28.1 million tons – 6.6 million tons in northern ports, 3.4 million tons
in central ports and 18.0 million tons in southern ports.
Compared with neighboring countries, Vietnam’s general ports are comparatively
small. The eight major general ports have shallow water depth ranging from five
to 11 m. Their combined length of berth of 8,267 m is, for example, roughly equal
to that of Tanjung Priok Port (8,911 m), Port Klang (8,648 m) and Manila Port
(7,592 m). But this is to be expected of gateway ports; modern berths for
exclusive containers and 30,000 DWT vessels or larger are necessary to
accommodate international transport chains.
Besides port capacity, the following weaknesses of Vietnamese ports must be
pointed out:
• Port operation is unreliable. There are several factors which contribute to this
bad reputation: limited navigable time, non-availability or lack of wellmaintained
cargo-handling equipment, lack of trained port labor, inadequate
supervision and management, and lack of incentives and unclear port
charges 1 . Foreign operators face difficulty in giving “dispatch money” to port
labor and management to achieve faster results.
• Ships must sail with insufficient ATNs and SAR services. In fact, there is still a
“black sea” on Vietnamese waters where no visual aid is available. Meanwhile,
the Vietnam Maritime SAR Coordination Center does not possess any SAR
fleet and oil spill protection equipment.
• Proper attention has not been given to policy setting in port development,
allowing implementation to go unguided by an overall policy on the subsector.
Port construction randomly done wastes precious funding sources. Major ports
cannot expand facilities by self-financing from port charges or relying on
external resource and technology alone.
1 One state-owned operator reported that in 1998 they suffered from demurrage of 1,122 days
from operating 21 general cargo vessels, mainly due to wasteful waiting time for high tide and
poor cargo-handling services.