Hutchison Ports Recognizes the potential of Blockchain.

12 December, 2018

Hutchison Ports recognizes the potential of blockchain technologies as a key element of change, with a wide-ranging impact on global supply chains, providing immense benefits to all aspects of operations and end-to-end visibility throughout the world.

As stated by Ivor Chow, Corporate Finance and Business Development Director at Hutchison Ports; Noticing that the Founding members of the Global Shipping Business Network have the aim to connect all interested parties, including terminal operators, customs agencies, transporters and logistic service providers by means of transforming the supply chain and increase its efficiency.

“This collaboration gathers all industries’ main players who strive to develop an open digital platform that will provide efficiency gains and reduce transaction costs”, He concluded.

The GSBN is composed of five large shipping companies and four port operators, who signed a declaration of intent to finalize a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the integration of a block chain consortium to resolve all the shipping management procedures and disruptive information gaps in the container transportation sector.

Likewise, Hutchison Ports Mexico, is collaborating with various users of the port of Veracruz to develop a port community system based on block chain. Baruc De la Fuente, Customs Administrations in Veracruz, expressed that the project and the port community systems are fundamental to improve the commercial efficiency and competitiveness in the port. “The objective of the port community system is to reduce times and efforts invested on the safe importation and exportation of containers, providing a much better service to customers”.

Ramon Gomez Barquin, President of the Association of Customs Agents of Veracruz, emphasized that the competitiveness in the ports is of most importance to achieve a long-term success, the usage of block chain technologies will allow the community to unite and find innovative solutions to improve port operations to benefit importers and exporters.

The software providers point out that the first planned application of the technology will allow senders to digitalize and organize their merchandise documents and automatically connect with relevant parties to streamline the documentation and approval process. The application is scheduled to be available December 2018.

Stakeholders will test the application for several months to quantify the benefits in terms of reducing the number of hours required to complete the container export process and examine how block chain can add responsibility and transparency to those involved.