Monetising smart port investments puzzles early innovators

Every port knows it needs to embrace the digital revolution engulfing the shipping industry, but figuring out what the return on investment ought to be is a much harder calculation to make. This cogent post argues that the delivering up-to-date information on items such container status to forwarders and consignees would represent a considerable step-change, and one obvious way to bring this forward is a port developing a community IT platforms, such as the Portbase system introduced in Rotterdam. However, “Data flowing through the community platforms represents another area of optimistic investments, but monetisation of any data-driven services is not an easy matter.”