HIT

Company Visit 5

Company Name : Hongkong International Terminal Limited

Company Address :  HIT Tower 1, Terminal 4, Container Port Road South,Kwai Chung, Hong Kong

Date of Visit : 27 March 2015

Schedule :

1. Presentation of company information
2. Visit Control Tower
3. Visit terminal

Company Background:

HIT is one of the busiest container ports in the world. It is established in 1969 and owned by Hutchison Port Holdings. It operates 12 berths at Terminal 4, 6, 7 and 9. It is very important to Hong Kong’s economy.  It has large amount of customers including Namsung Shipping (H.K.) Limited and Wan Hai Lines Limited. It has integrated supply chain network with logistics services.

Presentation of company information:

We have saw a model of HIT. It has displayed the area of each terminal. Also, the speaker has told us the owner and partner of each terminal. The business of HIT is mainly loading and unloading. It can move 30 times per hour for each machine. HIT has around 70% of transhipment which is also important business for Hong Kong. Besides, The staff has introduce different country terminal to us too.

Visit Control Tower:

We have visit the control tower which have separated into two teams. One is doing planning duty before the ship arrive the terminal and the other one is to control the activities when the ship arrived. It is real time processing system called OMS to supervise the situation of the terminal. Also nGen is a system to enhance the communication between partner and information transmit. It is less time consuming and increase efficiency.

Q&A :

1.      HIT owned a special management system called nGen, it is a system that control the whole function of the terminal. What are the competitive advantages you gained from it? If nGen encounter any technical or unexpected problems, are there any safety measures for HIT to continue the terminal operations?

nGen  is a system to control the operation of the terminal, including ship and yard planning, gate operations, and vessel operations; plus overall operations monitoring, equipment utilisation, productivity, and costs optimisation. Controller can find where the foods are easily. It enhances the efficiency of managing the terminal. Moreover, it has over 100 user-definable business rules for the controller to do the fine-tuned. It is user-friendly. HIT can handle more throughout by using nGen. As there are many professional technicians, the technical problems would be handled quickly.

reference: HIT: https://www.hit.com.hk/en/Innovation/Improving-Efficiency.html

2.      The terrorist like ISIS become more and more popular. What measures has HIT taken to ensure the safety of the cargos? How can you prevent the prohibit products inside the cargo?

As HIT would not know the goods inside the cargos, it cannot make sure the safety of the cargos. HIT can only trust their customers. It would know the background of the customer first. If their backgrounds do not have any problems , it would cooperate with them.

3.      The cost like the wage of labor is increasing. What measures has HIT taken to deal with the increasing cost?

The speaker did not mention in the visit. However, we guess the company could  try to decrease their operation cost and  their expense. Besides, the diesel fuel has been replaced by electricity in their handling operation. It can directly lower the cost and more environmental friendly. Next, the company might try to computerize the task in order to lower the labour cost.

4.      There are always typhoons hoisted in Hong Kong during summer. How serious would the typhoon affect your operation?

HIT operates 24 hours everyday. It only stops their operations, including labor and machine, during typhoon. Besides typhoon signal, it will depend on the speed of the typhoon. Until the typhoon have leave Hong Kong and it is in a safety situation, it will stop all the operation. If it is black rainstorm warning, HIT will operate normally.

5.      What are the effects to your company after the labor strike?

The speaker did not mention in the visit.

We think that it does affect to the company. No doubt, the shippers and other related companies have suffered a serious delay or forced to re-route in order to change another terminals. It directly affects company's profit. The most important thing is their reputation is affected. Since the company is providing the best, efficient and reliable service to customers, the labour strike influence the transit time and after the image of the company.

In fact, there are many well equipped and efficient ports which providing similar services. We think that Hong Kong is facing a serious competition and all companies want to reduce their operating cost especially the labor cost. HIT is not the one who suffer the problem, the industry is facing these challenges. In the long run, the workers in the logistics industry would be suffered the most. Also, the whole economy of Hong Kong will be affected and directly reduce the competitiveness.

6.      How does HIT get involved in corporate social responsibility?

As a leading private container terminal in the world, HIT also takes corporate social responsibility as important as its business. For HIT, environmental protection is their ongoing mission, in order to conduct its business in an ethical and socially responsible manner. Therefore, HIT get involved in many environmental protection activities, which included air pollution control measures, noise pollution control measures, waste management and resource efficiency, waste water and water conservation and energy consumption.

Besides environmental protection, HIT also get involved in other activities, such as re-build school in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Also, HIT has constructed some volunteers work among employees, i.e. visiting elderly people, to let them join the activities to get involved in the corporate social responsibility together.

7.      With the advancement of terminal business in Singapore and Mainland China such as Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, what HIT is doing these years to keep its competitive edges and compete with other competitors?

Although Hong Kong has the advantage of deep harbor that many big cargo ships can still enter such small harbor, different from Mainland China, Hong Kong has limited land space for HIT to develop. Although there are already 9 terminals in Hong Kong for cargo shipping but its capacity has already saturated and it may not be enough to fulfilling the increasing demand of cargo shipping. This may lead some potential customers shift to using Singapore or Shanghai. So HIt has try to gain more land from Government to expand their business as to handle more ships. Also, the size of ships are going to be bigger and bigger, which means more capacity per ship, and more cargo carry to terminal and ship away. So increasing capacity of terminal is the main requirement to increase HIT's competitive.

Reflection

By visiting HIT, it is a good experience for us to learn about how the terminal operates in Hong Kong. There is interesting that visiting the controlling floor of HIT and taking the bus to run around the terminals. When visiting the controlling floor, we can see that how HIT employees control those machine in the terminal based on the information of the computer in a real time basis. Those computers and software are powerful that they can foresee the consequences if they wrongly calculate the weight of container and allocate the place of cargo accordingly.  

Reference 
https://www.hit.com.hk/en/Innovation/Improving-Efficiency.html