DP World’s BOXBAY system to be used at South Korea’s Pusan terminal

DP World announced the first commercial use of its revolutionary BOXBAY High Bay Storage (HBS) system at South Korea’s Pusan container terminal, the world’s sixth-largest container port, on Wednesday.

Pusan Newport Corporation (PNC) and BOXBAY FZCO signed a contact on March 8 initiating the design and engineering works for the site to implement the storage system at the terminal. DP World developed the BOXBAY system in a joint venture with German industrial engineering specialists SMS group.

The signing of the contract that took place in Jebel Ali Free Zone was attended by Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, Group Chairman and CEO of DP World, and Burkhard Dahmen, Chairman and CEO of SMS group, the partners behind BOXBAY.

Bin Sulayem said: “If we were to imagine the future of trade, this is where it begins. We have taken a technology that has proven its effectiveness in the metals industry in Germany and further transformed it to create BOXBAY, an innovative container storage system to enhance global trade. Our pilot scheme in Jebel Ali has already shown the advantages of a fully automated, sustainably powered high-bay storage system. I’m proud that DP World has led this innovation that will now be adopted in Pusan. The technology reflects our continuous efforts to embrace technologies that enhance the flow of trade and further enhances Dubai’s position as a global leader in the ports and logistics industry.”

The BOXBAY high-bay storage technology will be seamlessly integrated along with the existing mode of ARMG/truck operations as a retrofit on an existing empty storage area. The system allows direct access to each container at any time, eliminating 350,000 unproductive moves per year. This will improve the overall truck servicing time by 20 per cent, further improving PNC service delivery to its customers.

SMS group originally created the storage system to handle heavy metal coils. Having proven the technology in the metals industry, it was refined for port logistics. DP World and SMS Group built a pilot facility at Jebel Ali’s Terminal-4 in January 2021. By the end of June 2022, 190,000 container movements had been carried out under realistic operating conditions to verify the market maturity of the system.

DP World has a 66 per cent stake in PNC, which handled 5.3 million TEUs in 2021.