Page 37 - Port Of Hamburg Magazine 01.2018

merger creates structures promising even greater success on the market, from which we as custom- ers also profit.” This entrepreneur also sees the merger from another angle. Since 2015 he has been CEO of the ShortSeaShipping Inland Waterway Pro- motion Center (spc). Expansion and promotion of shortsea traffic is something close to his heart. “By both road and rail, we are fighting a growing short- age of space. Driver shortage and infrastructural deficiencies will continue to plague the sector. Yet containers and shipping space are almost invariably available. So shortsea services are a splendid com- plement and alternative.”
The shortsea sector was sill relatively unknown 15 years ago, widely seen among forwarders as a com- petitor rather than a partner. Partly thanks to spc’s un- tiring efforts, everything is now different. This is proved by statistics from the BGV – Federal Freight Transport Office. In 2016 freight volume handled on shortsea services reached 182.8 tons, a 1.3 percent advance on 2015. “Despite the difficult background of the world shipping crisis, structural changes and vari- ous economic/political developments, in 2017 short- sea services again gained ground,” stresses Sander. “I anticipate stable volume growth again in 2018.”
Reasons for this are quickly found. To meet ecologi- cal commitments, forwarders are now looking more and more to CO2-neutral means of transport. Addi- tional strong arguments for waterborne transport are availability of shipping space, speed and rate stabili- ty. “There are naturally also some snags,” concedes Sander. “One problem is the tendency for ports to be hit by strikes, especially in Southern Europe.” That’s a challenge that shipowners and their clients happily don’t need to consider in Hamburg. Hamburg is very well positioned in the shortsea sector, offering numerous weekly feeder and short- sea links with Scandinavia, Poland, Finland, Russia, the Baltic states, also to the United Kingdom, Ire- land and Iceland, and the Mediterranean area too. The intriguing question is whether in future there will perhaps be a terminal combining all shortsea activities. Both suitable space and a comprehen- sive plan are available. Hamburg-based C. Stein- weg (Süd-West Terminal) entered a draft plan for a shortsea terminal with a reefer-logistics warehouse in the Hamburg Port Authority (HPA) Competition for a future-oriented use of the Steinwerder-South area of the port – and this actually took second place. ■
50 YEARS OF CONTAINERS IN HAMBURG ■
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