Serving the Teesside Business Community | 29
PD Ports CEO David
Robinson surveys
the vast Teesport as a
huge vessel, owned by
Stokesley-based MPI
Offshore, undergoes
repair works
PORT
POWERHOUSE
PD Ports CEO David
Robinson gives Tees
Business editor Martin
Walker and photographer
Chris Booth an exclusive
guided tour of Teesside’s
gateway to the world...
Y
ou’d be forgiven for thinking Christmas
has come early at Teesport.
As David Robinson gives us a guided
tour around Teesside’s vast dockland on the
‘High Tide Adventure’, a relatively small tug
boat, a red vessel arrives from Scandanavia,
packed with containers loaded with toys and
goodies.
But this isn’t Santa’s Sleigh... it’s a huge,
100-metre long ship freshly docked from
Helsinki, carrying dozens of containers from
around the world.
Many of these steel containers are
heading for two huge warehouses at
Teesport, where supermarket giants Tesco
and Asda directly employ more than 1,000
people between them. Here, one-and-a-half
million square feet of warehousing store
anything from electrical goods, hardware,
TVs, toys, furniture and homeware items,
ready for distribution around the whole of
the UK.
It’s only one element of the huge Teesport
operation which spans some 2,000 acres,
but the container side of the PD Ports
business continues to play a crucial role.
Around 460,000 containers weighing
around 36 million tonnes on 4,600 vessels
pass through Teesport every year.
It’s the second-largest container port in the
North of England – it’s 10 times bigger than
the Port of Tyne – and represents a sizeable
chunk of PD Ports’ annual £141m turnover.
“Our portcentric logistics model has
worked extremely well for us,” says David.
“We save companies millions of road miles,
which is why Tesco and Asda have invested
£180m here on Teesside to distribute to the