Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London which had not yet facilities to handle them.
When in 1978 the PriceWaterhouseAssociates team - which included yours truly - acted as consultants to the Penang Port Commission (PPC), it gave no thought to this already emerging phenomenon in its traffic and revenue forecasts but instead revalued existing port structures and recalculated depreciation rates as if the age of breakbulk cargo in what was essentially a port loaded and unloaded by lighters would never end.
The Penang Port Commission had been given a multi-million-dollar loan by the Asian Development Bank. As part of the bank's lending conditions, the Commission had to engage a team of consultants to review its procedures, and PriceWaterhouseAssociations was chosen. Our cost was just an added percentage point to the bank's interest rate, and I was chosen as head of the team as much for my past experience in shipping as for the colour of my passport, as Australia was one of the members of the Asian Development Bank. In foreign air everything is political!
This farce was made even more farcical as all the team's reports turned out to be almost mirror images of reports previously written by one of the team members for the port of Mogadishu in Somalia. I had not been aware of this fact until the fly-in-fly-out PWA "supervisor" during one of his frequent visits only half-jokingly remarked, "We'd all be in deep shit if ever our photocopier breaks down and we could no longer simply replace the word 'Mogadishu' with the word 'Penang' in all our reports."
Until that moment I had always stood in admiring awe as I watched that particular team member arrive in the office each morning, gaze for a while into the middle distance while tapping a long pencil against his puckered lips, and then, with astonishing ease and seemingly out of thin air, drew up reports of amazing erudition. The only thing amazing about this feat was his photographic memory with which he recalled those Mogadishu reports which he had committed to memory the night before.
US$1 was worth approx. AUS$0.88; therefore, US$27,000 = AUS$23,760
which was about twice an accountant's average salary in Australia in 1978
That kind of fake "management consulting" convinced me that I was in the wrong profession and I never worked for one of the "Big Five" (as they were then) accounting firms again. However, it is all grist for the mill as I read "The Box" which is the amazing story of how the humble shipping container reshaped shipping and with it the global economy.
After all, there's no better emblem of globalisation today than the container ship, which has made transport so cheap that it's more cost-efficient to catch a fish in Scotland, send it to China to be filletted, then send it back to Europe for sale, than to hire labourers in situ.
