Global Ports Development Report 2015

It highlights that the global port growth curve last year presented an ‘arc top’, registering a growth rate of only approximately 1%.

Global port throughput slowed significantly, at some of the major ports in the world it tumbled to 1.2%, from 5.1% in the previous year.

It was argued that the trade volume suffered the plunge because of the ante-displacement of demand, with the quarterly throughput of major global ports sank to negative growth for the first time in recent years.

Low fuel prices, interest rates and quantitative easing made sure that European ports managed to maintain a mild recovery momentum.

Europe’s annual growth rate of 2.7% was a slight increase compared to 2014. While US ports registered an increase of around 3% as a result of growing local business investment and energy consumption.

Major ports in Asia only registered less than 1% in 2015, a sharp decrease from that in 2014. China’s ports saw a slowdown in production advocates.

In the first half of the year, production activities at Chinese ports began to show signs of recession but the growth rate of containers for domestic trade gradually showed down in the second half of the year, crippling the port development growth.

Furthermore, European ports were influenced by the Ukrainian crisis, Greek debt, refugee crisis and terrorist attacks, leading to container throughput growth at global ports falling season on season.

Dry bulk cargo throughput was expected to grow, but weakened once again in 2015. While the throughput of liquid bulk cargo at global ports did positively grow in a stable fashion.

The global container throughput in 2015 did enjoy an increase, despite this the growth rate has fallen to around 1%.