President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has claimed that investment in the maritime sector is showing good results and supporting the maritime axis vision that he declared three years ago.
The so-called maritime highway program, which aims to connect western and eastern Indonesia through regular freight services, had reduced prices of goods in eastern Indonesia by 20 to 25 percent, the President said.
He also noted good progress in the expansion of Tanjung Priok Port in North Jakarta, which accommodated a large ship carrying 10,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers last week to serve a direct route between Jakarta and Los Angeles.
The President considered this a breakthrough, because it eliminates the need to transship cargo in Singapore.
“We hope another big port, Kuala Tanjung Port, will be finished this year. We need to work with other big ports that have wide networks,” he said during a work meeting at the Office of the Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister in Jakarta on Thursday.
The operation of Kuala Tanjung Port in North Sumatra may go to state-owned Pelindo along with the Port of Rotterdam and Dubai’s DP World, Jokowi said.
Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan said the average dwell time at big ports had been brought down to below 3 days, which compares to 6.4 days at Tanjung Priok Port in 2014.
He said the government was in the process of reducing port fees. “There has been progress on dwell times, but costly logistics are still a problem. We are still working on that. Hopefully it can be solved this year,” Luhut said.