SAVANNAH, GA, USA – On May 12, Georgia Ports Authority (GPA), a World Trade Center Savannah Founding Investor Partner, welcomed the largest containership to ever to call on the U.S. East Coast. The COSCO Development vessel has a capacity of 13,092 twenty-foot equivalent container units and measures 1,201 feet long and 158 feet wide.

In a GPA press release, Executive Director Griff Lynch commented on the event, "The COSCO Development is the start of a new era in the East Coast container trade. With their shift to larger, more cost-effective vessels, the shipping lines are gravitating toward gateway ports. The Port of Savannah is perfectly suited to handle the larger exchanges of Neo-Panamax vessels."

The Savannah Harbor Expansion Project (SHEP) will help accommodate the larger vessels with a deepening of the Savannah River. The project is currently 60% complete. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers showed that U.S. companies using Garden City Terminal to move their goods will save $282 million per year once the deepening is complete in 2021.
The Port of Savannah is the largest single container terminal in North America and in CY2015 handled 8.2 percent of the U.S. containerized cargo volume and 10.3 percent of all U.S. containerized exports.

To read the full article published by the Georgia Ports Authority, please see source below.

Pictured above: Georgia Governor Nathan Deal speaks in front of the container ship COSCO Development at the Port of Savannah, Friday, May 12, 2017, in Savannah, Ga. Photo Credit: Georgia Ports Authority/Stephen B. Morton

For additional information, please contact Kathleen Henry, Manager of Research and Trade Development at WTCSav, at khenry@wtcsavannah.org.