Another success story for the Port of Gdansk - a summary of the first three quarters of 2015

19.10.2015

October is usually a time for summaries because of the recent conclusion of the third quarter of the year. For the Port of Gdansk, the past nine months have marked an extremely favourable and successful period, both in terms of the quantity of goods handled, as well as events that will soon reflect on the development of the port area. These may could include the recently signed long-term lease agreement with OT Logistics, who will soon begin the construction of a deepwater bulk terminal at the Port of Gdansk.

The last 9 months also marked the beginning of an investment project for the expansion of the DCT container terminal and the extension of the intermodal container terminal in the Inner Port at the Szczecinskie Quay, as well as the start of construction works on a cold storage facility for frozen products just inland from the DCT, and finally the analytical-conceptual phase for the construction of the Outer/Central Port.

In a word, the past three quarters at the port have been packed with important infrastructural and commercial events. For the record, in the middle of the year the Port of Gdansk made a summary of the first half of the year, noting an 11.8% increase in cargo transhipment, while that figure now stands at 13.6%. This is the second best result among the leading seaports on the Baltic. If the rest of the year can generate a similar quantity of cargo handling, it is possible that the current year's result at the Port of Gdansk may be close to 35 million tonnes.

First of all, however, it is worth noting that over the past three quarters of this year we managed to break some new records, including the handling of liquid fuels and cargo, including containers, in terms of tonnage. Never before has Gdansk recorded such good results in this area within just 9 months of the year.

Over 11 million tonnes (11,127,320 million tonnes) of fuel has been handled at Gdansk, in other words as much as two years ago, in 2013, over the whole year. This result is nearly 30% more than last year, which was considered to have been very successful, yielding the second best result in history in terms of liquid fuels handled at Gdansk.

The great results for Gdansk transshipment terminals also included coal with a 28.5% increase in turnover at the quays of the Port of Gdansk, mainly thanks to the smooth functioning of the Dry Bulk Cargo Terminal.

General cargo experienced a smaller increase of 2%. However, given the very difficult year for shipping general - especially containerised - cargo, this result is certainly a cause for celebration. In this case, the containerised cargo handling tonnage is worthy of special attention, as it slightly exceeded the record result of the previous year of nearly 165 thousand tonnes.

Grain transhipment remained at a similar level as the previous year, mainly dominated by export. In the first three quarters, more than 1.1 million tonnes were handled at our Gdansk quays, the second best result in the history of the port after last year.

The biggest decline (9%) was recorded in the group of other bulk cargo, with approx. 2.5 million tonnes handled at Gdansk. As in previous years, half of it consisted of aggregates.

Such great results this year are very good news indeed for the Port of Gdansk in relation to the extremely cautious plans that had been prepared. On 1 January the so-called Sulphur Directive came into force, i.e. the continued economic sanctions between the EU and Russia dictated an extremely cautions approach to projections for 2015.

However, the first 9 months of this year have confirmed that it was not the first time that Gdansk managed to overcome crisis market conditions smoothly, not to say safely. While it is true that the end of the year and the final totals are still a few months away, it is still on the cards that this year will be successful if not record-breaking. Let us hope that this will be the case for our Gdansk terminals.