State-owned Shipping Corporation of India (SCI) is planning to begin its service to Myanmar from September.
‘We are planning to start our service to Myanmar sometime in September on experimental basis,’ SCI chairman and managing director A K Gupta said here on Friday on the sidelines of the Calcutta Freight Brokers Association AGM.
He said there would be one vessel providing container service.
‘There will be transhipment at Colombo. We are eying cargo from Hazira. We are now doing this on experimental basis between Chennai and Colombo and we may add more ports. There is commitment of support from the government level of both sides,’ Gupta said. Myanmar is also central to India's Look East Policy.
Being the only ASEAN country with which India shares a land boundary, Myanmar is India's gateway to the larger ASEAN community.
Meanwhile, Gupta indicated that sluggish trend in the freight industry was expected to continue for some time more and he does not forseee any recovery over the next two years.
‘Don’t see industry recovering for the next two years.
The supply-demand mismatch continues,’ Gupta said. He said the fundamentals haven’t changed though there was some spike in December-January but ‘look at today’s Baltic Dry Index, which is at abysmally low level of 736.’
‘We are concerned with recovery of Chinese economy. If its GDP recovers from 7 per cent to 10 per cent, the global shipping industry will recover. But we don’t see economy recovering for the next two years,’ Gupta said.
The recession in shipping is continuing for such a long period that sustaining has turned difficult, he pointed.
However, he expected that talk of India controlled tonnage in the budget, under which the vessels would be flagged outside so we will have the tax benefits which would be beneficial to the sector. Gupta said the SCI don’t have resources to diversify.
‘We have exited the chemical transportation JV with Forbes and in near future we don’t foresee getting into it again. In near future the strategy is to survive the difficult period ‘mutthi bandh karke’ (with fist tightly closed) without much expenditure in order to get out of this situation,’ he added.