TECHNICAL AND FINANCIAL EFFICIENCY OF BRAZILIAN CONTAINER TERMINALS

Container terminals play a central role in the global distribution of goods, as essential elements in most supply chains. Container handling in Brazilian terminals has been growing in the past five years. So, given the importance of container handling activity for Brazilian economy, it is relevant to study how the resources are used and also the efficiency of these terminals. This paper evaluates the technical and financial efficiencies of Brazilian container terminals. Initially, bibliographic research was done to understand the handling activities of container terminals, the financial and technical efficiency concepts and the variables related to them. After that, the data were gathered based in reports by port authorities and the technical and financial efficiency were calculated for Brazilian public container terminals. Tecon Santos, Convicon, Tecondi, Rodrimar, Libra Rio, Sepetiba Tecon, Tecon Rio Grande and Tecon Salvador were selected for this study due to the data availability. At the end, we established the technical and financial efficiency rankings enabling comparison of these two types of efficiency for each terminal. Besides this, the terminals' breakeven points were calculated. The data indicate that the terminals with best technical efficiency are not necessarily those with best financial efficiency and vice versa. This paper is relevant since it allows identifying terminals' weaknesses, making it possible to develop actions to improve their performance. Besides that, it helps decision-makers to manage future investments and improvement actions.