Westports

For transshipment, the port operator has seen encouraging improvements in major shipping routes, such as intra-Asia, Asia Africa and Asia-Australasia, and industry observers see opportunities to tap emerging routes such as China-Africa or intra-Southeast Asia, or to grow the regional feeder network.

The company remains optimistic that volume throughput growth will be relatively similar to its past performances and expects container volume to grow by five to 10% in 2014.

It will be a 5% on the potential impact of port operator alliance members (P3) re-routing their Asia-Europe/Mediterranean port calls by the second half of 2014.

Westports has nudged up its volume assumption in 2014 to 7.83 million from 7.63 million (at five per cent year-on-year growth), in view of the expected minimal impact of the P3 alliance, since measures are in place to mitigate it.

As such, its earnings forecast for 2014 and 2015 are being nudged up.