FHM Humayan Kabir:

Chittagong Port Authority (CPA) has offered a window berthing facilities to a French shipping company CMA CGM for operating its vessels at the port to facilitate international trades, officials said Thursday.

CPA official said under the offer, the world's third largest shipping company CMA CGM will now be allowed to anchor its vessels at the port terminal every Wednesday and complete loading and unloading work within 48 hours.

"We applied to CPA for getting the window berthing facilities. It has allowed us to use the port through the system early this week," Capt. Tanveer Hussain, Senior Operation Manager of CMA CGM told the FE.

It will cut the lead time of the importers and exporters as our vessels will arrive at the port at a certain time every week and also depart at a fixed time, he said.

The CMA CGM had maintained berthing window at Chittagong Port for over one year in the past. Later due to berthing congestion the port authority has withdrawn the facility. With improved productivity Chittagong port is in a position again to maintain such berthing window.

Window berthing is a system where a ship will maintain a fixed time in a week for loading and unloading containers and goods at the port terminal.

Accordingly, a vessel would be given a specific time window to be berthed, upon arrival, and any delays would be penalized. This system is practised at different international ports around the globe.

A director at the CPA said the long-awaited "window berthing" would help expedite the import and export trades of the businessmen reducing the lead time.

Under the system, the businessmen from now on would be able to know the time of arrival and departure of any ship like the airlines services, he said.

Capt. Tanveer Hussain said his company will follow the schedule very strictly as their head office in Marseilles, France will also monitor the timing.

"We update vessel position every six hours and vessel planning is done by French Ship planners and CMA CGM is the only carrier which maintained the window at Chittagong Port in the past," Tanveer Hussain added.

The French company CMA CGM operates nearly 7000 TEUs (twenty-feet equivalent units) per month at the Chittagong port.

The country's largest port Chittagong accounts for 90 percent of the external trade and handles more than 1.5 million containers a year.