Singapore, a city-state with barely 100km of coastline, continues to pursue maritime scale that countries with vast coastlines rarely contemplate. The island recently reaffirmed its ambition to handle 65m TEU annually by 2040, steadily climbing towards that figure from its current throughput of around 45m TEU.
The engine of this expansion is the Tuas mega-port. Ten of its planned 66 berths are already operational, with an additional berth scheduled to open before the end of the year. Yet administrative rigour matters more than physical concrete. Singapore’s transport minister, Chee Hong Tat, regularly focuses on ground-level operational bottlenecks. When data revealed that urgent cargo transfers between Tuas port and Changi Airport took up to five days, he intervened directly to dismantle bureaucratic delays, establishing a strict target to execute such intermodal transfers within 24 hours.
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