Port of Portland puts toes back into container shipping waters

By Bruce Abbe, strategic advisor for trade and transportation

After a long and somewhat painful hiatus, the Port of Portland has gotten a modest but very welcome restart of container shipping service. Monday marked the first day that a container shipping vessel has called on the port since three ocean carrier lines pulled their service from the port in 2015-16 following four years of port labor strife.

An SM Line vessel was scheduled to drop off about 150 inbound containers and load exports for delivery to Asia on Monday. This week’s port call will be the first of a regular weekly service for Portland, which once serviced as many as 340,000 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent) containers.

SM Line, based in South Korea, is a relatively new ocean carrier that emerged after Hanjin, one of South Korea’s then-two major carriers, along with Hyundai (HMM). In fact, SM chartered ships that previously were Hanjin vessels. SM started with service calls between Los Angeles/Long Beach and north Asian ports. It announced over a year ago that it planned to add Pacific Northwest service.

Hanjin, Hapag-Lloyd, and Westwood Shipping stopped calling at Portland as of 2016, following a lengthy, costly dispute between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 8 and the port’s terminal operator, ICTSI. The Port of Portland agreed to end ICTSI’s operating lease in 2017, and has been operating the port’s busy breakbulk and bulk shipping services since then, while working to bring back container service.

The weekly SM Line service will call at Portland, as well as Vancouver, B.C. and Seattle, to Chinese ports of Yantian, Ningbo, Shanghai, plus Pusan and Kwangyang, South Korea.

Portland used to regularly handle wheat, pulses and grain shipments that came via container-on-barge from Idaho and Eastern Washington on the Columbia River.

Go here for more information from the Journal of Commerce, and here from an earlier announcement from the Port of Portland.