[astrodust]

Unloading these ships with state of the art equipment takes upwards of twelve hours. Many of those containers have GPS tracking devices embedded in them.

The sorts of ships routinely subjected to piracy are those carrying an easily transportable commodity (e.g. oil) that can be pumped out or stolen quickly and offloaded on a market without arousing suspicion.

You'd spend weeks going through all those containers to look for anything useful. Many, I'm sure, contain half-finished products, super cheap consumer goods, promotional merchandise, and niche application bulk supplies with almost zero value on the grey market.

If you had someone on the inside that could position the crate you wanted to steal right on top and ready to pick off, you'd just do that with a helicopter anyway and save yourself the trouble of hijacking it.

[ethanbond]

Very interesting! That's actually pretty shocking that they can be unloaded in 12 hours. I would've expected far longer than that, though now thinking about it I suppose it seems reasonable with all those crazy crane systems that industrial docks have.

[bkor]

Hanjin has max 13.000 TEU vessels. That's maybe 8000 containers. One crane can unload at around 30 containers per hour. You might be able to use 6 cranes on such a vessel. It works out to 45 hours to unload such a vessel if completely full. I might be off a bit in some of the calculations, but 12 vs 45 hours is quite a big difference.

There's various physical limitations. You cannot have too many cranes working on a vessel (need to have space between cranes). Further, most cranes aren't that quick. Depending on a region you might hit 45 containers per hour, but that's pretty high (usually only seen in Asia).

[astrodust]

Is the upper end getting much higher with aggressive automation efforts like those in Rotterdam? (https://www.flexport.com/blog/port-automation-oakland-rotter...)

Smaller vessels can be cleared out inside a day, but the larger ones are still a project for all but the best equipped ports.