At the end of July last, the V Maritime Silk Road Port International Cooperation Forum was held in the city of Ningbo (Zhejiang Province, China). In 2019, this forum coincided with the Chinese Maritime Forum, both being organised by the Zhejiang Seaport Group together with other business organisations and leading ports such as Algeciras Bay, Rotterdam and Antwerp and focused on building a platform to drive communication and cooperation in the port-logistics ecosystem to achieve common goals: equality, co-working and mutual profit.
The last day of the forum saw the Connectivity Section presented, moderated by Mr. Akihiko Takahashi Manager of the Japanese company, Suzuyo that focused on digitalisation, automation and the port-logistics sectors role in e-commerce development.
The final days session was shared among presentations made by ports like Antwerp, Valencia and local Chinese companies like Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries. It was during this session that the Port of Algeciras Bays representative, Mr. Francisco De los Santos APBAs CIO had the chance to present our ports digital strategy and our main innovation projects and initiatives with such ground-breaking start-ups and tech companies as Amazon, Huawei, Vodafone and Telefonica.
Our ports delegation took advantage of the Asian Tour to visit the Port of Singapores Maritime Innovation Lab (MIL) and continue to pursue co-working agreements that would enable both ports to link up their innovation ecosystems.
The MIL is one of the Port of Singapore Maritime & Port Authoritys (MPA) initiatives to implement their ports concept of a Living Lab and build both a physical and digital platform that could help create innovative solutions. This is something that we at APBA have been working on for some time now and should enable us to build an environment that helps foster innovation product and service experimentation and testing and, therefore, the eventual development of new solutions for our Port Community and the innovation ecosystem itself.
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