The port of Paranagua was long known as the port with endless line up where importers used to pay huge amount of demurrages, which represented enormous unrecoverable biases. In a seminar just held in the city of Curitiba, port authority boast that it has diminished in 72% because of port´s modernization.
According to study let out by the port, in 2011 de demurrage value was U$ 16, 88 per ton. In 2016, it dropped to US$ 7, 05 per ton. Thence in 2017, it dropped again to U$ 4, 68 per ton and 2018 it fell a bit more to U$ 4, 70 per ton. In total, it was a drop of 72% that represents an economy of U$ 70 million in a year.
According to port´s, President Mr. Fregonese, The port of Paranaguá and Antonina offer today seven berths to attend fertilizers. Being two specialized berths and five alternative use. There are elven portable shore cranes in the port, which belongs to private port operators, and those can achieve a daily discharging rate of 132.000 tons. So 31 million tons per year. Furthermore, he reaffirmed that today Paranagua has a storage capacity of 3 million tons.
Further, Fregonese explained that in order to achieve these results, Appa made a diagnosis of the entire fertilizer discharge system to find out where the main time-consuming bottlenecks were and make operations less agile. “We work to make possible an improvement in infrastructure and import logistics. This includes automating processes, changing mooring rules, monitoring the productivity of fertilizer discharges, and especially numerous joint actions with private port operators to address bottlenecks, “he said.
“The final result was a 67% reduction in the amount paid with Demurrage,” added Fregonese. The numbers explain this reduction. The fertilizer sector paid in 2011 about U$ 100.5 million of demurrages due to vessels long waiting time for berthing. In 2016, the amounts spent on demurrage were US $ 34.4 million. In 2017, U$ 23.9 million of demurrage was paid to 6.8 million tons of fertilizer, and in 2018, through September, U$ 32.9 million was paid to 7.14 million tons of fertilizer.
Furthermore, he said the port is studying other alternatives to diminish even farther the vessels waiting time thus making the port even more attractive for fertilizers importers.
