Singapore has been named the Best Seaport in Asia for the 29th time at the 2017 Asia Freight, Logistics and Supply Chain Awards (AFLAS).
According to the Maritime Port and Authority (MPA) of Singapore, the Port of Singapore clinched the award for its performance on a range of criteria including container shipping-friendly regime, timely and adequate investment in new infrastructure to meet future demand, cost competitiveness, provision of suitable container shipping-related infrastructure, and the facilitation of ancillary services.
The AFLAS Awards honours and recognises organisations for their leadership and consistency in innovation, service quality, reliability, and customer relationship management.
The awardees were determined by a poll of the readers of Asia Cargo News, a regional freight and logistics publication.
The Port of Singapore beat the other finalists hailing from Hong Kong and Shanghai.
MPA Chief Executive Andrew Tan said amidst the issues faced by the maritime industry of Singapore, the city-state managed to keep the title of being the best seaport in the region.
"Despite the current challenging conditions, we were able to retain our position as the world's busiest container transhipment hub in 2016," Tan noted.
He added, "This would not have been possible without the strong support of our partners. MPA will continue to work closely with all our stakeholders to strengthen our competitiveness as a premier global hub port and international maritime centre."
Singapore's maritime industry contributes about 7 percent of the country's gross domestic national product. Recently, MPA inked five deals with local and international companies to boost digitalisation and introduce robotics, automation and data analytics.
One of the deals was with ST Electronics. The partnership with the engineering firm will be looking into vessel traffic management systems and smart data analytics to detect real-time anomalies in performance, and to determine trends in shipping traffic.
