Container traffic at Indonesia’s biggest and busiest seaport, Tanjung Priok in North Jakarta, declined 5.13 percent year-on-year from January to February, but the port operator expects improvements with factories in China reopening.

State-owned port operator Indonesia Port Corporation (IPC), also known as Pelindo II, saw 992,212 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of container traffic from January to February this year, compared with 1.05 million TEUs in the same period last year. Port container traffic is the flow of containers loaded and unloaded from land to sea transportation and vice versa. 

“The decline reflects a direct impact from the coronavirus outbreak, which originated in Wuhan, China. However, this is understandable because, when this virus started to spread in December 2019, there was a drop in productivity there as well,” said IPC transformation director Ogi Rulino. “[…] China contributes the most to container traffic at Tanjung Priok Port.”

Ogi said traffic would return to normal soon in the future, especially as industrial activities in China had started to recover. IPC has yet to change its annual targets for container traffic and revenue at 8.1 million TEUs and Rp 13.5 trillion respectively. Its net profit target this year is Rp 3.1 trillion.

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IPC would monitor container traffic in the next two to three months to determine whether it needed to review its business targets, Ogi added.

With the help of 17 subsidiaries, the port corporation operates a total of 12 ports in the western part of the Indonesia. Besides Tanjung Priok, IPC also operates Teluk Bayur Port in West Sumatra, Palembang Port in South Sumatra, Tanjung Pandan Port in Belitung and Pontianak Port in West Kalimantan.