Text II
Global commerce
Driverless vehicles whizz across five new berths at Tuas Mega
Port, which sits on a swathe of largely reclaimed land at the
western tip of Singapore. Unmanned cranes loom overhead,
circled by camera-fitted drones. The berths are the first of 21 due
by 2027. When it is completed in 2040, the complex will be the
largest container port on Earth, boasts PSA International, its
Singaporean owner.
Tuas is a vision of the future on two fronts. It illustrates how
port operators the world over are deploying clever technologies to
meet the demand for their services in the face of obstacles to the
development of new facilities, from lack of space to environmental
concerns. More fundamentally, the city-state’s investment, with
construction costs estimated at $15bn, is part of a wave of huge
bets by the broader logistics industry on the rising importance of
Asia, and South-East Asia in particular. The IMF expects the
region’s five largest economies—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore,
the Philippines and Thailand—to be the fastest-growing bloc in the
world by trade volumes between 2022 and 2027. The result is that
the map of global commerce and the blueprints for its critical
nodes are being simultaneously redrawn.
From: The Economist, January 14, 2023, pp. 57-58