Rotterdam Port Back to Growth
After two consecutive years of negative volume growth, Europe’s busiest box port Rotterdam was back on the growth trail in 2014, as container throughput grew 5.8% to 12.3m teu.
The different market sectors performed quite dissimilar. The break-bulk, with 12.1% growth, did exceptionally well. Oil products fell the most, by 8.1%. An extra 4.8% of crude oil passed through the port. Dry bulk fell by 0.7%.
In Toto, in 2014, the throughput in the port of Rotterdam went up 1% to 445 million tonnes compared to the previous year.
"In 2015 we expect the same growth in throughput as last year at 1 percent," Allard Castelein, CEO of the Port of Rotterdam Authority, said in a press release. "This year the new container terminals on Maasvlakte 2 will be busy starting up.”From 2016 onwards, however, there will actually be extra capacity for further growth" he added.
The port of Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe. Its neighboring rivals Antwerp and Amsterdam reported a bigger growth percentage recently.
The Belgian port of Antwerp was expected to handle a total of 198.8 million tons of freight by the end of 2014, an increase of 4.2 percentage compared with 2013.
