Daily News
From Home Furnishing Business
Lessons from Port of Los Angeles
July 7,
2014 by in Industry
Here's an interesting read on what we can learn from our country's seaports. The furniture industry knows that's where the imported goods come in, but what other lessons can be learned?
The first thing you notice on a visit to the Port of Los Angeles is the cranes towering along the water, poised over the massive ships beneath them. The second is that there are no people, at least none visible: Sometimes you catch sight of a silhouette in a crane’s control room or a truck cab, but the work that goes on is largely far above human scale.
This is the US gateway to the most important economic trend of the new century: The epic export-driven growth of China’s economy. Because it is the deepest port on the west coast of the US and 19 million people live within 200 miles (320 km), it’s the busiest port in the United States. It handles the most containers and the most goods by value, and is the sixteenth busiest on the globe (seven of the 10 busiest ports in the world are in China). Last year, it handled 2,143 ships, and cargo worth $285.4 billion—equal to almost 2 percent of US gross domestic product.
My recent visit to one of the world’s key trade hubs underlined a few things about how that trade works.
Read Entire Story Source: Quartz