Hong Kong will find that an ego-boosting bridge to Macau is no match for a shorter, cheaper and quicker route to Shenzhen's container terminals just up the river.
As workers yesterday dug out the first scoop of the multi-billion dollar bridge between Hong Kong and Macau that is supposed to boost container throughput, China’s central government was busy officially endorsing the death of Hong Kong’s port business.
In the parallel universe inhabited by Hong Kong government officials, the bridge connecting Hong Kong, Macau and the mainland city of Zhuhai will bring countless full containers for export to the port, ensuring double happiness and prosperity for life.
That, as everyone knows, is complete manure, but in Hong Kong the developers really run the show and when it comes to pouring concrete, nothing stands in the way.
Yet even as the first shovel of contaminated mud was drawn from the filthy Pearl River Delta (PRD), Beijing gave its approval for another link between the western PRD and Shenzhen that will connect the fast developing western side of the PRD directly with the container terminals of Shekou, Chiwan and Dachan Bay. Both projects will be completed at the same time, around 2016.
With Hong Kong’s share of direct exports from the manufacturing areas of Dongguan falling steadily, the government has long clung to the belief that container traffic from factories in the western PRD is the antidote to flagging throughput.
This belief almost certainly sprung from an overwhelming desire to build the HK-Macau bridge whatever the cost (US$10.6 billion, can believe it!), and the forecasts and statistics were all presented in a way to back up the project.
All dissenting voices were ignored. As shippers have told us many times, it is way cheaper and more efficient to barge containers from the western PRD to Hong Kong than it will be to truck them along a 30km bridge with all the toll fees and the double customs points.
But the link between the western PRD and Shenzhen higher up the delta will quickly be filled with an army of trucks hauling containers from the factories in the west directly to the Shenzhen terminals for export. This will see barge traffic to Hong Kong dwindling and hasten the setting of the sun over the city’s once mighty port.
Hong Kong’s port operators will sell their terminals to developers for harbourfront apartments and simply move their offices to the facilities they already operate over the fence in Shenzhen.
And Hong Kong government officials will be left looking around scratching their heads and saying: “Hey, logistics was one of our pillar industries. Where’s it all gone?”