During the first six months of 2009, the port of Antwerp in Belgium handled just over 77m tonnes of freight, according to the port authority.
This drop of nearly 20 per cent compared with the year-earlier period can be partly explained by the negative impact of the economic crisis. However, the figure exaggerates the impact, the port authority argued, since the first half of 2008 saw larger than normal throughput due to the industrial dispute in Le Havre.
As such, the decline was more or less in line with CEO Eddy Bruyninckx’s expectations earlier this year. “At that time we estimated that the volume would be down by around 15 per cent,” he said. “In fact, we expected the decline in conventional/breakbulk to be smaller, but the volumes have stabilised in the past few months, with the amount of shipping freight remaining the same in the second quarter. We suspect that this trend will continue for the remainder of the year.”
Container volumes dropped by 17.7 per cent to just under 43m tonnes in the period between January and June 2009, while for standard containers (20ft equivalent units) the volume was down 18.5 per cent at 3.6m TEU. Conventional/breakbulk volumes were also down, with 35.5 per cent less being loaded and unloaded from January to June.
