Shipping

Huanghua Port Development Plan in China moves ahead

CCCC First Harbor Engineering Co., Ltd. won the bid for Phase 4 EPC project of Huanghua Port (coal area), with a contract value of 3.507 billion yuan recently.

This project comes as another large EPC contract after the company undertook the Phase 3 EPC contract of Huanghua Port for hydraulic structure works, civil works, equipment and supporting works.

Located at Huanghua Port Development Zone, Cangzhou, Hebei Province, the project involves four 50000t coal berths with a terminal length of 1072.5 meters (the main structure of the terminal will be designed to accommodate one 100000t, two 70000t and one 35000t vessels concurrently), and one 50000t coal berth with a terminal length of 310 meters.
 

Global shipping hits record volume as prices fall -UN

International shipping volumes gained 4.0 percent in 2011 to a record 8.7 billion tonnes even as prices fell sharply owing to surplus capacity, a United Nations think tank said Tuesday.

Despite increasing demand, “world ship supply capacity expanded much faster, at a rate of 10 per cent, reaching for the first time a total of 1.5 billion deadweight tons,” the UN's Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) Review of Maritime Transport 2011 explained.

The indicators are important because about 80 percent of global trade is transported by ship, UNCTAD noted.

As an indication of the falling prices, the cost of transporting a 20-foot container from Shanghai to northern Europe plunged from $1,789 (1,367 euros) in 2010 to $881 in 2011, the think tank said. The average cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the US West Coast fell over the same period from $2,308 to $1,667, according to the UN report released in Geneva. And in a “remarkable shift” away from previous years, developing country ports took a far greater slice of the global shipping sector pie than before, UNCTAD said.

In developing countries, ports loaded 60 percent and unloaded 57 percent of world seaborne trade by volume, the report showed.

Meanwhile, in a sign of declining competition in the industry, the average number of shipping companies dropped by nearly 23 percent between 2004 and 2011, UNCTAD said.

During the same period, the size of the largest ship deployed nearly doubled, it noted.

The Colombo iPhone Dev Camp a success

The first ever iOS developer gathering in Sri Lanka, The Colombo iPhone Dev camp themed Develop, Connect, Master held recently was sponsored by 99X Technology.

The main objective of this programme was to introduce, gather and build the local iOS developer community, a common place where they can share and exchange different experiences as well as to explore many value additions for the enhancement of skill sets for these developers.

The program kicked off with the keynote speech delivered by Arne Solheim, Project manager at Nordica AS, Norway. It continued on with lightning speech sessions from Lolitha Weerasinghe and Janidu Wanigasooriya, two experienced iOS developers from 99X Technology who shared their insights on Memory debugging and using Berkley DB in iOS applications.

After which, the participants witnessed the development of iOS apps right from scratch, the first phase of this session was conducted by Ms. Malshani Nanayakkara.

This phase was a very interactive one with the iPhone Dev camp participants getting the opportunity to work as a team with peers in the industry whom they had meet for the first time, which was followed by a UI Prototyping session as well. The outcome of this practice proved to be very favourable and developers had shown their true talent and experience with their UI designs.

The second phase of the application development session was conducted by Dileepa Jayathilaka, Technical Architect at 99X Technology, he started his presentation with a few humorous examples which was successful in burying the complexity of the session which made it very exciting and interesting for the audience. He also made sure that all the complex concepts penetrated the audience.

OpenArc wins Gold award

The premier event of Software Competition held in Sri Lanka every year, NBQSA (National Best Quality Software Awards) organized by British Computer Society Sri Lanka Chapter, recently recognized the ‘SkyLease’ the industry leading software solution designed, developed and implemented in many banks in Sri Lanka by OpenArc Systems Management (Pvt) Ltd (OSM), with a Gold Award for the best quality software under the ‘Financial’ category.

From left Sandaru Hettiarachchi, Communication Engineer, Charu Fernando, Assistant Project Manager, Daya Hettiarachchi, Chairman/CEO, Firaaz Fysal, Head of Sales and Marketing, Thushanka Abeygunawardana, Project Leader and Jayanath Weerakkody, Tech Lead of OpenArc

Leading banks such as DFCC, DFCC Vardhana and Bank of Ceylon are successfully using this leasing software product integrated with an online real-time General Ledger connected with their core banking systems. BOC being the largest implementation has now automated its leasing business connecting 310 branches across the Island through OpenArc “SkyLease”.

‘SkyLease’ is a next generation software product introduced by OpenArc, which is technologically advanced, Internet browser based, database independent software solution comes as a sub module of OpenArc “SkyBank” core banking and finance software solution that is being developed by OpenArc. ‘SkyLease’ is a flagship software product which is now offered by the company as a migration solution to its users of previous version of leasing software namely ‘ProLease’ which is currently used by large number of banks and finance companies in Sri Lanka.

OpenArc has successfully implemented ‘SkyLease’ at other banks such as DFCC and DFCC Vardhana Bank as well. At some companies, already the company has successfully migrated the old version to this newest version of software for the handling of their Leasing operations across the bank branch network. ‘SkyLease’ and the ‘SkyBank’ product suite is a futuristic software solution developed by OpenArc using Open Technology and Java development platform and it runs on the Internet web browser and Android smart phones and other mobile devices.

It is a platform and database independent software solution which makes it unique from the rest of the conventional software applications, the Founder Chairman/CEO of OpenArc, Daya Hettiarachchi said.