The key South American port of Santos is still suffering terrible congestion problems that are causing delays to vessels of up to a week and costing carriers millions of dollars every year in charter hire.

That is the opinion of Julian Thomas, the head of operations for Hamburg Sud in the East Coast of South America trade lanes, who believes that more capacity for Santos - which serves Brazil's major conurbation of Sao Paulo 'just can't come quickly enough'.

He told CI eXpress: 'The main capacity problem in this trade lane is Santos. The lack of handling capacity and storage areas has been coming into its own and causing tremendous delays for container ships. We have had ships arriving, within their allotted windows for berthing, and still waiting for more than a week.'

Thomas, who is also heads up Hamburg Sud's Brazilian flag operation Alianca, added: 'There has been some investment in existing facilities in Santos but nowhere near enough.'

He continued: 'One short term solution could be to create some new bonded areas but with the presidential elections this year the relevant authorities have maybe not had enough time to look into that possibility.

'In many ways Santos is a victim of the Brazilian economic success story.These are growth pains of a growing economy and in some ways are good problems to have but we are all suffering at the moment with this congestion.'