The latest North Europe Global Port Tracker published by Hackett Associates and the Institute of Shipping Economics and Logistics (ISL), said that the economic fundamentals have changed due to the threat of deflation in the EU and the civil war in the Ukraine. This is having a knock on effect to the German, French and Italian economies.<\/p>\n
Ben Hackett, of Hackett Associates, told Port Strategy<\/em> that there is not much that northern ports can do with regards to the slow-down in growth but they should tackle congestion issues if they want to remain competitive.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we have here is a double problem. The slow season and deflation which is affecting Chinese and Indian exports from Germany. This is coupled with larger ships where ports are expected to unload 5,000 teu in one sitting causing congestion issues.\u201d<\/p>\n He told PS<\/em> that ports like Rotterdam have hit a brick wall recently in terms of congestion, because it was struggling to handle 18,000 teu ships in conjunction with labour issues, which resulted in some loss of business to competitors.<\/p>\n \u201cBut this is a short term problem because there is plenty of capacity in Europe. What ports really need to focus on is dealing with these larger ships landside and clearing the congestion,” he said.<\/p>\n Mr Hackett pointed out that this will not be like the 2008 and 2009 slow-down, there will still be growth but just not as much as was expected, or as high as ports have been used too more recently.<\/p>\n Currently, year-to-date, the total volume handled, including empties and transshipment, by the North Range ports is 2.9% greater than at the same point of 2013. Loaded incoming volumes are ahead of the level set in 2013 by 4.1% while loaded outgoing volumes are up 3.1% year-on-year.<\/p>\n The deep sea forecast for 2014 projects a 5.4% increase in total imports to Europe, with 22.8m teu. North Europe is projected to gain 7.1% to 14.7m teu, while the Med-Black Sea region is projected to gain 2.6% to 8.1m teu.<\/p>\n The tracker says that actually for the six north range ports a projection of 2.8% inbound and 2.4% outbound growth for laden containers is realistic for the near future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Industry experts say that there are danger signs that economic growth will slow down in the last quarter of 2014 and the first half of 2015 so North European ports should focus on clearing congestion to stay competitive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":9137,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-9136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9138,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9136\/revisions\/9138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9136"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=9136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}