Q4 is going to be strong on volumes, says Gujarat Pipavav's Sorensen

A quiet quarter from Gujarat Pipavav as operational weakness persists but the company sees sequential improvement in volumes. Jakob Friis Sorensen, Managing Director, Gujarat Pipavav Port discussed the numbers.

He expects Q4FY21 to be strong on volumes.

“Q4 would be strong on volumes and the container volumes will continue to grow and that is encouraging,” he said.

“Overall I am quite happy with the volumes that we have just finished in Q3. Non-container volumes are helping us to keep the overall margins in place in a very satisfactory mode,” he added.

“We have seen fewer skip calls from shipping lines and that is encouraging. At the same time, there is a little bit of an international offset in the global shipping market at the moment,” he said.

He believes because of the lower container volumes, the revenues are slower.

“Although we have more volume in bulk, it doesn’t make up for each other. Containers are still the more profitable part of our business, so we will be slightly below there,” he said.

According to him, the shipping lines need more time to mobilize the capacity again.

“To mobilize the global fleet which was reduced quite a lot due to COVID last year, it takes a lot more month. At the same time, the trading pattern has changed. A lot more people are ordering online. The imbalance is quite significant. I do think in the next coming months it will even out,” he said.

“Our operations are a lot of cost-efficient. We make our people safe and we make sure that we operate uninterrupted,” he said.

He believes that cargo will move from road to rail.

“It also enables customers to be able to predict how is the transit time, where is the cargo and when is it going to arrive. So that is quite significant in order for India to be competitive with the global logistics market. We will have a lot more reliability coming in and that is going to help everybody,” he mentioned.