Successful results for the Port of Gdansk
Good half-year results herald a successful 2013 performance

18.07.2013

According to the latest ranking published by the influential British magazine "Container Management", the Gdansk port has placed 112th in the world, with nearly 930 thou. TEU handled in 2012. It is hardly probable, that - among those who bore witness to the signing, on 28th January 2004, of the agreement that launched the construction of the Deepwater Container Terminal "DCT" Gdansk - there were many optimists capable of predicting such a rapid pace of successful "proving out" of this very special investment project.

During the first six months of 2013, DCT alone handled 565, 622 TEU. Given the systematic weekly shipping volumes delivered from the Far East as part of the AE 10 Container Service, and following the introduction of Triple-E class container carriers (18,000 TEU) to the service calling at Gdansk, this year's DCT throughput schedules of almost 1.1 million TEU sound quite secure. Consequently, the outlook for the Port of Gdansk to become part of the elite circle of the world's top hundred seaports with the greatest significance seems quite realistic.

Coal, which throughout the 1970s and 1980s used to account for the major commodity handled by the Gdansk port, has lost its popularity on the foreign markets over the recent years. A total volume of import and export coal handled by the Gdansk port over the entire last year amounted to slightly more than 1.9 million tonnes. However, this year's forecast, modest as it might appear due to the poor experience of the last decade, was accomplished by the port already in April. Up to the last day of June, the throughput volume reached almost 2.7 million tonnes, of which two-thirds comprised of export coal.

A similarly capricious quality has been characteristic of the liquid fuels market over the last few years. A nearly 4.5 million tonnes handled by "Naftoport" during the six months of 2013 accounts for almost half of the volume processed throughout the entire last year and bodes well for this year's results.

Similarly, statistics concerning grain throughputs show positive outlook, with over half-million tonnes processed over the past two quarters. A dropping tendency has only been observed for aggregate imports (ca. 1.1 million tonnes in the half-year), which was actually predicted by the port's market analysts. While an overall average monthly throughput for all types of cargo in the first half-year of 2012 totaled around 1.8 million tonnes, the first half-year of 2013 has seen the rates exceed 2.3 million tonnes. Thus, a proposition can be made with confidence that the 2011 results, which ranked 4th best in the history of the Gdansk port, as well as its 2012 successful performance, will be outrun by this year's results. Gdansk successfully entered the year 2013 and is set to end it with even greater success!

Janusz Kasprowicz
PGA SA PR Officer