The Hindu Business Line : Visakha box terminal throughput reaches 1,00,000 TEUs

THE throughput of the Visakha Container Terminal (VCT), the latest container terminal of the Visakhapatnam port, reached a record level of 1,00,000 TEUs on January 21.

This was when the vessel, mv Lal Bahadur Shastri, belonging to the Shipping Corporation of India, discharged the 1,00,000th container in the terminal, according to sources close to Visakha Container Terminal Pvt Ltd, the joint venture company that runs VCT.

The sources attributed the achievement to the company's customer-friendly approach to offer first-class services as also to unstinted support received from the cross-section of users, namely the trade, the shipping lines and NVOCCs (non-vessel owning cargo carriers), shipping and forwarding agents, the Container Corporation of India, Customs, Visakhapatnam port authorities and others.

As many as 33 international container operators/NVOCCS are now operating through the terminal which is acting as the gateway not only to Andhra Pradesh but also to large parts of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and even West Bengal, the sources said.

VCT, they said, was poised to handle large capacity mainline vessels, 8,000/9,000 TEU each, in the current year, and touch the one million TEUs of throughput in the not too distant future.