Starting with those first arrivals, the operators expect a steady stream of giant container mother ships, which they plan to turn around in an average of 24 hours per ship. At the same time, the port will be receiving even greater numbers of smaller feeder ships, which will bring containers in from smaller African, Middle Eastern and South Asian ports to be loaded on the mother ships, and remove containers dropped by the mother ships for distribution to the smaller ports. Jamal Taufiq Aziz, director general of ports and maritime affairs in Oman s Ministry of Communications, who holds a master s degree from Georgia Tech University, confirms that Salalah s illustrious maritime history played a role in his government s decision to build a container port there. After the 1986 economic crisis when oil prices started to drop, we knew we needed to diversify to keep Oman s development process on track, he explains. We started flipping through history books for sources of income in the past.
Oman has a very strategic location on the world map.
It has a very long coastline and it is quite central to a number of countries, including Iran, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and the African coast for the distribution of goods. We found that container shipment is on the rise. Everything can be containerized now, even vehicles. And containers are moved on larger ships across the Pacific, the Atlantic, and between Europe and Asia. We concentrated on the latter.