What is TEU?
TEU (Twenty-Foot Equivalent Unit, TEU) is an important unit of cargo vehicle capacity that is widely used in the shipping industry. The standard is based on the volume of a 20-foot (6.1 m) intermodal ISO container, a standard-sized metal container that can be transported by various modes of transport.
The TEU standard is applied everywhere: from determining the carrying capacity of container ships and choosing a container type to calculating port activity.
How did this universal unit of measurement, adopted as a standard in the world of logistics for more than half a century, come about?
The idea of TEU was born in the head of the American entrepreneur Malcolm McLean in 1936.
Malcolm McLean was born in Maxton, North Carolina, in 1913. In 1935, he graduated from high school and, with his brother and sister, founded McLean Trucking, a trucking company that transported empty tobacco barrels, and in which he himself did not shy away from working as a driver.
Once at the port in 1937, McLean had to wait a long time until unloading was completed, and that’s when he thought about the need to streamline and standardize the entire process of loading, transporting and delivering goods. Since then, the thought has not left him that he should come up with a more efficient method that will help get rid of the need to load goods individually, slowly and inefficiently, wasting time and money.
His ingenious solution was the idea of producing and ubiquitous containers of a standardized size. These containers could be transported both on trucks and on ships without the need to unload and load the cargo with each change in the mode of transportation.
The idea of transporting the trucks themselves on ships was brought to life before the Second World War. In 1926, a regular rail service began by a luxury passenger train from London to Paris, the Golden Arrow (Fleche d’Or), on the Southern Railway and the French Northern Railway. Four containers were used to transport passengers’ luggage. These containers were loaded in London or Paris and delivered to ports, Dover or Calais, on flatcars in the UK and by CIWL Pullman Golden Arrow Fourgon wagons in France.
By 1940, McLean’s company already had 30 trucks, and over time it became one of the largest transport companies in the United States – with 1,770 trucks and 32 terminals.
The idea of container transportation did not leave the entrepreneur, and in the early 1950s, McLean decided to use containers on a commercial basis. By 1952, he was developing plans to transport his company’s trucks on ships along the US Atlantic coast from North Carolina to New York. It soon became apparent that “trailers”, as they were called, would be inefficient, taking up too much space in potential cargo space on board a ship. The original concept was changed in such a way that only containers were loaded onto the ship, without wheels.
In 1955, McLean sold McLean Trucking for $25 million and built his business into one of the largest US trucking fleets by purchasing two new companies, Pan-Atlantic Steamship and Gulf Florida Terminal. The combined companies were named McLean Industries.
Confident of the revolutionary nature of his idea, McLean patented stackable shipping containers, took out a $22 million bank loan, and in January 1956 bought two World War II T-2 tankers, which he converted to carry containers – a place to stack them. stood out both on deck and in the hold.
April 26, 1956 one of the converted tankers, SS Ideal-X (unofficially named “SS Maxton” after McLean’s hometown), was loaded and sailed from Newark Elizabeth Terminal Port of New Jersey to Port of Houston, Texas. The first container ship successfully transported fifty-eight of the first, then 35-foot (11 m) metal cargo trailers, which became the prototype of modern containers.
Thus, the first voyage of container cargo transportation took place, marking the beginning of a new era of maritime transport.
In 1956, loading one ton by hand, by longshoremen, cost $5.86. The use of containers reduced costs by 36 times. Now loading cost McLean 16 cents a ton – and it was a fast load!
In 1960, McLean changed the name of the company to Sea-Land Service, and in 1966, transatlantic sea transportation started for the first time. After two rounds of standardization negotiations in 1968 to define the classification, dimensions and identification of containers, the terms 20-foot and 40-foot containers were born, of which the first was called “Twenty-foot equivalent”, that is, TEU, and the second – 2 TEU or FEU ( “Forty-foot equivalent”). Standardization helped the flourishing of intermodal transport. By the end of the 1960s, McLean already owned 36 trailer ships and had access to 30 port cities. His idea has evolved, expanded and taken root all over the world.
The versatility and practicality of the TEU today: on the container ship and in the port
Today, the TEU plays an extremely important role in global trade and logistics. It is not only a unit of measurement for the most popular types of shipping containers, but it is also used to measure the size and capacity of a vessel and calculate port activity.
Some of the world’s largest container ships today have a capacity of over 14,000 TEU, while small feeder ships deliver as little as 1,000 TEU per voyage.
Vessel sizes are usually classified according to their capacity:
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- Small container feeder: up to ~ 1000 TEU
- Feeder container ship: ~ 1000 to ~ 2000 TEU
- Feedermax container ship: ~ 2000 to ~ 3000 TEU
- Panamax container ships: ~ 3000 to ~ 5000 TEU
- Post Panamax container ships: ~ 5,000 to ~ 10,000 TEU
- New Panamax (or Neopanamax) container ships: ~ 10,000 to ~ 14,500 TEU
- Ultra Large Container Vessel (ULCV): ~ 14,500 TEU and above
Currently, the largest container ship belongs to the Swiss carrier MSC. MSC Gülsün is 400 m long, 61.5 m wide and 33.2 m high, and is capable of holding up to 23,756 TEU. Built by Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI), the container ship was handed over to MSC earlier this year.
How to determine how efficient a port is?
Not all units of measure reflect port efficiency and throughput. A port can handle $1.2 billion worth of cargo a day or have a total area of 5,000 acres, but what does that mean in terms of handling volumes? TEU is widely used to calculate port activity including throughput to get a better idea of how much cargo is passing through a port. From the World Bank to every port’s statistical report, TEU is the standard for everyone.
The largest ports in China, Shanghai and Shenzhen handle over 65 million TEU per year, or 5.4 million TEU per month. The largest US ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach, handle over 16 million TEUs per year. This averages out to about 1.4 million TEU per month.
So the standardized metal container, invented by an American entrepreneur in order to speed up the transportation of goods by sea, changed the world. It is believed that it was Malcolm McLean who revolutionized the maritime industry in the 20th century. His idea to modernize the loading and unloading of ships, which until then was carried out in much the same way as the ancient Phoenicians did 3,000 years ago, led to much safer and cheaper cargo transportation, faster delivery and better service. The world owes a lot to this visionary, “the father of containerization,” as the 14th U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Norman Mineta, said.
International cargo sea container transportation in Ukraine is successfully carried out by M&M Ukraine (head office in Kiev, subdivision in Borispol and Odessa) in all promising and demanded world directions. “M&M Ukraine” provides high-quality and safe cargo transportation from China to Ukraine, from Ukraine to China, to Europe and to the USA.
Created from http://www.icontainers.com/ and publicly available data.