Westport creates history again with a brilliant achievement of 1 million TEUs in 365 days, after only being in operation for 4 years.

Westport's development has been marked by spectacular growth from 120,000 TEUs in its first full year of operations in 1997 to 470,000 TEUs in 1998 and 850,000 TEUs in 1999. The '1 million in 1 year' accomplishment is a fitting culmination to a number of record breaking highlights during the year 2000. A record monthly volume of 103,752 TEUs was registered in October followed by the highest weekly volume of 25,795 in the week commencing 20th November.

Of the 1 million TEUs, 50% came from transshipment traffic, with 25% from export and 25% from import.

In announcing the achievement, Executive Chairman Westport, Tan Sri G. Gnanalingam said "We are proud of our achievement, which I would like to attribute to our staff working in close partnership with our clients and industry players at Westport".

"Besides our stalwart clients, like CMA, Hanjin, Maersk, Evergreen we are delighted to have onboard this year new MLOs, like CSCL, Cosco, Yang Ming, K-Line, UASC and IRISL who have made this achievement possible. The 1 million TEU augurs well for Port Klang as it would contribute to its achievement of more than 3 million TEUs, propelling it to the top 10 league of the world's largest container ports", he added.

To meet the upsurge in container volume and to enhance customer service, Westport has embarked on capacity expansion from 1.8 TEUs to 2.5 million TEUs with the construction of an additional 600 meters of berth length and an investment of more than RM100 million in equipment. This phase of development will be fully completed in February 2001.

As the new kid in the port industry, Westport had from its early days, moved to change the face of the port industry. From its gardenport environment to its fastport achievements in both container and conventional operations, the world's first flexiport has set the trend and pace for the port operations of today.

21 December 2000