DP World has announced the first commercial use of its BOXBAY High Bay Storage (HBS) system at its Pusan container terminal in South Korea, which is one of the largest box ports in the world.
DP World’s subsidiary Pusan Newport Corporation (PNC) and BOXBAY FZCO signed a deal on 8 March initiating the design and engineering works for the site to implement the storage system at the terminal.
Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, chairman and CEO of DP World, commented, “We have taken a technology that has proven its effectiveness in the metals industry in Germany and further transformed it to create BOXBAY, an innovative container storage system to enhance global trade. Our pilot scheme in Jebel Ali has already shown the advantages of a fully automated, sustainably powered high-bay storage system.”
DP World developed the BOXBAY system in a joint venture with German industrial engineering specialists SMS group.
Tiemen Meester, COO of Ports & Terminals at DP World, said, “It’s a tremendous step forward to announce our first commercial use of BOXBAY. The PNC terminal is an exemplary operation that is already technologically advanced and forward focused. With the introduction of the BOXBAY high-bay storage system, we will be able to better serve our customers while keeping our people safe and cutting carbon emissions from the environment.”
The BOXBAY high-bay storage technology will be seamlessly integrated along with the existing mode of ARMG/truck operations as a retrofit on an existing empty storage area, according to a statement.
Additionally, the system allows direct access to each container at any time, eliminating 350,000 unproductive moves per year. This is expected to improve the overall truck servicing time by 20%.
DP World and SMS Group built a pilot facility at Jebel Ali’s Terminal-4 in January 2021 and by the end of June 2022, 190,000 container movements had been carried out under realistic operating conditions.
DP World has a 66% stake in PNC, which handled 5.3 million TEUs in 2021.
