Well, as the global trading patterns shift and evolve, part of any government policy, any trade policy, is to look at those shifting patterns to see how we can capitalize on them. Concurrent with that is the equipment that actually serves to move all of this stuff around, the 90% of everything that moves around the planet at one point or another.
There are two things that we watch: one is the changing global trading patterns, and the other is simply the size of the ships. We've seen a lot of changes within the global maritime industry. The ships are considerably bigger. The container ships back in the early 1990s were in the 4,000 TEU range. Those are like small feeder ships now for the 22,000 TEU ships that are currently being built. These ships are three times the length of football fields. They have huge drafts. They require much greater landside infrastructure to offload and then process all of that out of the port, get it on to rail or on to road.
I keep talking about infrastructure, but that is a major competitive area for us. As the shipping lines move towards larger ships—larger, deeper, longer—we, as ports, have to have the infrastructure in place: the longer turning basins, the bigger cranes, the bigger landside connections. We also need the data processing capability to be able to manage all of that, to handle the cargo efficiently. That's one area. Again, because we are seeing these ships crossing the oceans, coming in from Asia, from Europe, we have to be able to respond to these bigger ships. Therefore, infrastructure investment is one area.
The other, again, is on the regulatory side, to give the ports financial flexibility, through borrowing, permitting, and letters patent amendment processes, so that they can respond as change within the global maritime sector speeds up.