Interisland cargo shipments grow slightly for Young Bros.

Young Brothers Ltd.’s interisland cargo shipments keep showing incremental growth.

The state’s largest interisland cargo carrier said Wednesday that volume edged up 0.6 percent in the first quarter from the year-earlier period as four of the six neighbor island ports showed increases.

Separately, Young Bros. also lowered its fuel price adjustment Friday to 0 percent from the previous rate of 0.95 percent.

“The first quarter ended with only a modest increase in overall shipments,” said Roy Catalani, vice president of Young Bros. “So far we aren’t seeing any strong trends emerge and it’s possible that, consistent with our cargo volume projections for the year, this lukewarm first quarter will foreshadow the rest of this year.”

Young Bros.’ cargo volume has been showing slight increases with gains of 1.1 percent in 2015, 0.5 percent in 2014 and 1.5 percent in 2013.

The company said its first-quarter results are on par with the full-year volume increase projection of 0.4 percent that was calculated for the company by economist Paul Brewbaker of TZ Economics.

“Recent economic conditions in Hawaii’s neighbor islands have not been as good as on Oahu,” Brewbaker said. “In contrast to the early-2000s’ economic expansion when neighbor islands homebuilding was a dominant engine of Hawaii economic growth, the neighbor islands in the 20-teens are experiencing, and seem likely to continue to experience, relatively muted growth of aggregate output, income and jobs compared to Oahu or to national economic experience.”

Young Bros., which is regulated by the state, tracks cargo volumes using a standard unit measurement called “container/platform equivalents,” or CPEs, carried on the company’s fleet of barges. Young Bros. uses the CPE measurement so it can compare cargo volumes across different sizes of containers.

For the first quarter, the volume of interisland cargo totaled 31,512 CPEs, compared with 31,309 CPEs in the first three months of 2015.

Lanai showed the largest percentage increase in volume at 21.9 percent as major construction companies shipped large amounts of supplies and equipment from Lanai with the completion of resort renovation projects in the first quarter of the year. Outbound shipments from Lanai jumped 47.2 percent while inbound shipments increased 13.9 percent. Elsewhere, cargo volume was up 3.8 percent for Hilo, 1 percent for Nawiliwili on Kauai and 0.4 percent for Molokai.

Kahului, the largest neighbor island port in terms of volume with more than one-third of the shipments, was down 1.9 percent while Kawaihae on Hawaii island was off 6.5 percent.

The agricultural sector was plagued by dry weather conditions as outbound volume declined 8.8 percent to 1,742 CPEs during the quarter from 1,911 in the year-earlier period. All ports showed decreases, with Hilo incurring the largest decline of 14.5 percent and the port of Kawaihae, on the Kona side, decreasing 8.7 percent. Those two Hawaii island ports combined had a drop of 12.7 percent.

Young Bros. said that yields of papaya, a dominant crop in the southern part of the island, have yet to recover from damage during last year’s heavy rain, and large quantities are not expected until later this year.

At the other ports, agricultural volume was down 10.5 percent on Kauai, 7 percent on Oahu, 1.8 percent on Molokai and 1 percent on Maui. There were no outbound agricultural shipments from Lanai.

Agricultural volume includes only cargo that qualifies for the company’s island agricultural product discount of 30 percent to 35 percent, which applies to locally grown agricultural products.

CARGO AT PORTS

The shipping volume between Honolulu and neighbor island ports fell in the first quarter of 2016 from the year-earlier period (measured in container/platform equivalents):

* Total does not include multiple shipments between islands.

Source: Young Brothers Ltd.