Philippines’ Subic Bay International Terminal Container Corporation (SBITC) last week received three new reach stackers and 16 new Kalmar Ottawa terminal tractors, parent company ICTSI confirmed to IHS Maritime on 30 September.
This gives the facility, two hours by road to the north of Manila, much more capacity – an important consideration as the capital is prone to congestion.
The latest additions increase the terminal tractor fleet to 23 units or by 128% and double the stacker fleet, ICTSI said.
Each of the terminal tractors communicates directly with Navis, the terminal’s operating system via a unit mounted on each vehicle.
Along with the opening of a one-stop shop, the new tractors and stackers will allow the facility to improve its services.
“The significance is that the parent company (ICTSI) is giving full support to a subsidiary (SBITC) situated in a key strategic location in Luzon whose primary objective is to create a northern gateway that allows a more fluid ingress and egress of cargo in the country,” SBITC general manager Roberto Locsin told IHS Maritime.
“These investments make sense at a time of renewed interest in Subic and the efforts of Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) and Subic Bureau of Customs (BOC), who promote the success of our importers and exporters in the region,” Locsin said.
Set up in partnership with the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) and the Philippine Bureau of Customs (BOC) and SBITC, the one-stop shop is expected to speed up the processing of import transactions.
It is located inside the New Container Terminal 1 beside the SBITC administration office, which means exporters will no longer have to go to different areas to get documents processed.
This post was sourced from IHS Maritime 360: View the original article here.