Modern Terminals embraces Maersk’s blockchain maritime database to speed up shipping
- Modern Terminals has signed on to a Maersk-IBM blockchain platform to digitise shipping, a notoriously paper-based business
- A rival blockchain solution is being developed as competitors are concerned about Maersk’s dominance of the future of shipping, which carries 90 per cent of global trade
Hong Kong’s second-biggest container port manager has signed on to a blockchain solution for documenting logistics data developed by the world’s largest shipping line, as a battle looms over the technology used to keep track of global shipping, responsible for 90 per cent of global trade.
Modern Terminals Limited has become the sole Hong Kong participant of TradeLens, a blockchain platform developed by Danish shipping behemoth AP Moeller-Maersk Group with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), scheduled for a roll-out at the end of this year.
“That is the Holy Grail – one place to see the whole [supply chain] in one spot,” said Modern Terminals’ managing director Peter Levesque, during an interview with the South China Morning Post, adding that the platform would be the single system that shippers, freight forwarders, imports and terminal operators can all work with.
The shipping industry is not alone in using blockchain solutions - a sequential distributed database most famously used to created bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies - to solve real world problems. Financial services had taken the lion’s share of blockchain usage, making up 82 per cent of the technology’s use last year, dropping to 46 per cent this year, according to a report by PwC.
TradeLens works principally with the documentation in shipping, much of which is still paper-based and therefore inefficient and open to fraud. Container ships have to travel with paper documents, where immediate verification can be a challenge. Blockchain will allow end-to-end verification, helping to speed up customs clearance.
“It does not seem like much, but it is,” Levesque said. Without blockchain, “you’re going on faith that what’s on the document is what’s in the container,” he said.