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Singapore is also an island, but its relevance to global trade has more to do with the strait it sits in than in being an island. Obviously there are more facto
by jessekv 2y ago
Singapore is also an island, but its relevance to global trade has more to do with the strait it sits in than in being an island. Obviously there are more factors, compare Singapore to Peneng, for example.
- bboygravity 2y agoThere are a couple 100 or so more Islands all around Singapore. Your comment doesn't say much.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bobthepanda 2y agoI think that only proves the point that Singapore is very much an exception and there isn’t any particular need for ships to stop at islands on their way.
- teractiveodular 2y agoNo, there absolutely is a huge demand for transshipment hubs. By shuttling cargo through Singapore, goods from all across Asia can be consolidated in one point for delivery to various European locations, and vice versa. It's the same model as airport hubs. However, like many network efforts it's a winner-takes-almost-all market. Tanjung Pelepas is just across the border in Malaysia but it was too little, too late.
- bobthepanda 2y agoSure, but transhipment hubs don’t have to be islands. In fact they usually aren’t. Hawaii isn’t and it’s the only landmass for thousands of miles. Anchorage isn’t for seaborne traffic. Etc. A lot of Singapore’s thing is also manufacturing from raw imports and then shipping out processed goods.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> but transhipment hubs don’t have to be islands. In fact they usually aren’t. Hawaii isn’t and it’s the only landmass for thousands of miles. Hawaii isn't a hub because it's the only land for thousands of miles. You want the hub to be on the way to wherever you're going, not a quarter of the way across the world from there.
- rswail 2y agoAnd Singapore has leveraged that trade by implementing tax policies that make it in huge demand for financial trans-shipment. A lot of Australia's resources are bought and sold via Singapore precisely for the tax advantages of funneling things through there without the actual resources going through their ports.
- BurningFrog 2y agoThe nature of being a transport hub means that there is only one in a given region.
- bobthepanda 2y agothere's a couple hundred million people in Southeast Asia. There can be more than one. In fact, there are. If you look at ports by tonnage, Port Klang in Malaysia is bigger than Rotterdam, and Tanjung Priok in Indonesia is bigger than New York.
- BurningFrog 2y agoWhat I mean by "transport hub" is a place where you drop of containers to be picked up by other ships to go to their final destination. So you can fill up a ship in LA with containers going to 10 different Asian ports, and drop them all off in Singapore. This works best if everyone does that at one central location. You're right other Asian ports are very big, but I think they more serve as origin or destination.
- hinkley 2y agoDo they have good deep water harbors?
- gotorazor 2y agoDude, ignore these people. HN has the weirdest bunch of computer nerds that hasn't taken a history class in their lives. For everyone else, Singapore is important because it sits right at the end of the historical trade route of the Straits of Malacca. There is a whole wikipedia entry about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Malacca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Malacca
- netsharc 2y agoThanks for the complimentary description, Mr. Knows Better.. Admittedly my source is the 2nd half of this video, but you'll need to have taken a German class to understand it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS4GyHEhNvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS4GyHEhNvk
- nine_k 2y agoBut the idea is that Iceland may end up sitting right on the new busy trade route across the ice-free Arctic ocean. Not a given, but an okay speculation fodder.