By Theo Notteboom
The year 2019 brought a range of challenges and opportunities for European container ports. In this contribution we summarize the main developments and present an outlook for 2020.
Container volumes up, but concern about rising trade barriers
The year 2019 will go down in history as a year that brought healthy container volume growth for most European container ports, although growth slowed down in the second quarter. The year-on-year growth figures for the top 15 European container ports in the first nine months of 2019 were particularly high in Piraeus (+20.7%), Valencia (+8.3%), Algeciras (+7.2%), Hamburg (+6.9%) and Antwerp (6.4%), closely followed by Gdansk (+5%), Barcelona (+4.1%), Le Havre (+4%) and Rotterdam (+3.8%). Containerised throughput in Genoa saw a close to zero growth, while Bremerhaven, Felixstowe and Southampton are expected to end 2019 with traffic losses.
Read PortEconomics member Theo Notteboom full article-first published @Port Technology International- by following the link.
