Thailand Study Tour

Written by Neeraj Mehrotra and Tim Smith

 

This is where it all starts – our visit to Laem Chabang International Terminal.

All ready and excited to be at our first visit.

The day began with an early start at 6:30am. I had been quite excited and looking forward to this visit as this would be the first port that I would be visiting. Ports are the lifeline for logistics and can truly be called the backbone of a logistics infrastructure.

Ports play a strategic role and can have a significant impact on the economic growth of the area/country where they are situated. With the growth in the size of container ships, the requirements of infrastructure across ports has also significantly increased. Laem Chabang is Thailand’s largest port and handles about 25% of national trade. We were honoured to visit the offices of Laem Chabang Container Terminal (LCIT), a DP World company. LCIT handles around 1.6m containers per year. LCIT CEO Captain Alpesh Sharma and Head of People Ms. Kathleen Leung explained some of the challenges they gave every day, including the challenge to attract new talent to the industry! We were fortunate to visit the operations control tower where LCIT coordinates the handling of up to 150 containers per hour. It was truly amazing to see the complexity of planning needed to execute an efficient loading and unloading of a ship, which would involve balancing of weight on the ship, sequencing of delivering to various ports on the way etc, while also coordinating this with the tide level too!!! Quite an experience.