The Ports of Auckland (POAL) has announced that its automation plan will be finished by June 2020, with the first phase going live at the end of March.
New Zealand’s biggest port gave the update in its 2019 financial statement. It originally announced the automation project in July 2019 and, according to POAL, the infrastructure work has been “largely completed”.
It is expected to increase its TEU capacity from 900,000 to 1.7 million once all elements have gone live.
This will help it to continually meet the demands of more container traffic, in particular from Southeast Asia.
In its statement, POAL said testing and preparation is “going well” and it is currently testing new terminal operating software using live terminal data.
The roll-out plan does, however, include a slight delay, with the phase one, which will affect the northern berth, go live in March instead of the initially planned February.
POAL took this decision in order to handle what it called “unexpectedly high” volumes in January.
POAL’s traffic dropped by 2% in 2019.
