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Despite
this claim, however, the source did not
provide any specific data on the precise
amount that he believed has been lost to
foreign liners that have been employed to
carry Malaysian cargo volumes.
Yet
to say the least, few if any tears were
shed when MISC withdrew from the liner trade.
As one ex-Malaysian port official said to
Fairplay Shipping Weekly some time ago,
MISC was never "star" performer
when it was part of the Grand Alliance.
"I
don't feel the vacuum [in reference to MISC
left behind by MISC's exit] is alarming
as MISC was never a major player in the
liner trade to begin with and Malaysia had
always been dependent on foreign liner services
to facilitate much of its international
trade anyway", Mr Khalid added.
Much
of that dependence stems from Malaysia's
decades-old policy of cabotage where indigenous
shipping is protected from the world's major
liners through a deliberate policy of giving
priority only to Malaysian-registered vessels.
That
inertia of shielding trade gave little or
nothing of an incentive to develop vessels
of the type used by MISC or Singapore's
APL to name just a few. Or even for that
matter to develop collaborative arrangements
like how Vietnam once did, with the some
of the world's leading class societies to
build world-class or IACS-specific container
vessels.
Nor
was there much of an effort to duplicate
steps taken by export-driven economies in
developing maritime cluster services; all
for nothing more than Malaysia's reliance
has always been on its palm oil and natural
gas exports to drive its maritime trade.
Manufacturing
is negligible in Malaysia except for some
sputtering activity in the southern state
of Johor where Danish container giant, Maersk
has a stake in the port of Tanjung Pelepas
(PTP).
Most
of the Malaysian shipping companies servicing
the container trade are mainly focused on
domestic trade (between Peninsular Malaysia
and Sabah/Sarawak) and intra-ASEAN trade
(mainly feeder services) as they have small
vessels.
With
a cabotage policy, glut of vessels in the
market, low freight rates plus the fact
that manufacturing has hardly if ever stirred
the nation, can Malaysia really be blamed
for sitting on its hands?
The
jury is out, but one thing however, is clear.
The country will continue to bleed financially
from the outflow of foreign exchange to
foreign liners.
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