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Dubai Ports' Decade Of Growth (Forbes.com staff 03.01.06)

Dubai's location at the mouth of the Persian Gulf has made the city-sheikdom a trade crossroads for six centuries. Today, Jebel Ali, one of its two ports, is the largest manmade port in the world and sits next to a huge free-trade zone.

The state-owned company that developed and runs Jebel Ali, its associated free-trade zone, which numbers more than 3,800 companies from 100 countries, including Colgate-Palmolive, H.J. Heinz, PB, Sony, Nokia, DaimlerChrysler, among its residents, and Dubai's smaller terminal, Port Rashid, is Dubai Ports. Under its chairman, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, it had two roles; as a port authority, responsible for the regulation and administration of the the ports, and as a business, which develops and operates them.

Until last year, Dubai Ports was loosely separated into two parts, the Dubai Port Authority and DPI Terminals, its ever-further reaching investment arm. Last year, the regulatory functions were spun off as the Dubai Ports and Jebel Ali Free Zone Authority, leaving DP World to handle what had mushroomed into the world's sixth-largest port terminal-operating business, overseeing 22 container terminals in 15 countries. [...]

The P&O deal would make Dubai Ports the world's third-largest ports operator, behind Li Ka-shing's Hutchinson Whampoa's ports business and the Singapore government's PSA (which lost out in the bidding for P&O), and leapfrog it over China's state-run COSCO and over APM Terminals, part of the AP Moller-Maersk transportation group, which is based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Most of them, including the two government-owned operators, already run ports in the U.S., where at least 90 terminals are operated by non-U.S. businesses.

The industry is fast consolidating on a global scale because size offers shippers the opportunity for one global contract, rather than needing to negotiate with a number of ports around the world.

This story from All Things Considered yesterday was pretty funny, Other Foreign Companies Avoid Port Scrutiny (Adam Davidson, 3/01/06, All Things Considered)

Many port terminals in the United States are operated by foreign companies. One terminal in New York is operated by Orient Overseas Investment Limited, based in Hong Kong. OOIL is closely linked to the Communist party and its army in mainland China.

...not least because the security experts are so dismissive of the notion that the Dubai port deal could have any security impact at all that there can be nothing left of the opponents case but xenophobia.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2006 5:28 PM