After six consecutive quarters of decline, in the second period quarterly report of 2024 freight traffic in Union ports European Union is expected to have grown by +1.8%. The conditional is due to considerable doubts about completeness, accuracy and timeliness of the data released by the Institute of Eurostat European statistics on European port traffic that gives years and have recently been repeatedly expressed by our newspaper ( of 4 November 2024). Eurostat announced today that in the period April-June last year the main ports of the Union European Transport, i.e. the ports that annually handle over a million tons of goods, recorded a total traffic of 858.0 million tons of cargo compared to 842.9 million tonnes in the same quarter of 2015. 2023.

Containerized traffic alone, already increasing in the two previous quarters, in the second quarter of 2024 it was up +5.7% with 206.4 million tons handled. In rolling stock traffic also recovered with 117.5 million tons (+5.8%) and liquid bulk with 315.5 million tons. It is On the other hand, the decline in dry bulk volumes continued. totalled 171.7 million tonnes (-5.0%).

The global growth in traffic was also mainly driven by cargo at embarkation, which amounted to 328.7 million tonnes (+2.5%), with a more content of goods at unloading, which amounted to 529.3 million tons (+1.4%).

Among the main European maritime nations, in the second quarter of 2024, the ports of the Netherlands handled 136.8 million tons of goods (-0.3%), those of Turkey, candidate nation for EU membership, moved 132.9 million tons (-0.7%) and Italian ports, with 128.0 million of tonnes, marked the largest increase among the European nations whose ports handle more than 10 quarterly million tons, having recorded an increase of +8.8% on the second quarter of 2023. Spanish ports follow with 127.9 million tonnes (+5.5%), Belgian ports with 72.2 million tonnes tons (+2.7%), German ports with 69.4 million tons (+1.0%), the French with 67.8 million tonnes (+1.6%), the ports in Norway, which is part of the European Economic Area, with 50.7 million tonnes (+6.7%) and those of Greece with 44.4 million tonnes (+2.0%).

Among the main ports in terms of volume of containerized traffic, counted in terms of twenty-foot containers handled in the In the second quarter of last year, Eurostat highlights the volume of 3.40 million TEUs handled by the Port of Rotterdam (+1.4%) followed by the 3.08 million TEUs handled by the system port of Antwerp-Zeebrugge (+2.1%) and then from the port of Bremerhaven with 1.11 million TEUs (+8.0%) and the ports of Hamburg with 1.93 million TEUs (-2.7%), Piraeus with 1.13 million TEUs (-10.1%), Algeciras with 1.22 million TEUs (+0.7%), Valencia with 1.47 million TEUs (+16.8%) and Gioia Tauro with 724 thousand TEUs (+2,0%).

The data released by Eurostat show that in the first half of the year by 2024, European ports handled 1.67 billion tons of goods, with a decrease of -0.7% over the first six months of the previous year, of which 623.8 million tonnes of bulk cargo liquid (-0.4%), 339.5 million tonnes of dry bulk (-7.3%), 397.4 million tons of containerized goods (+5.4%), 216.6 million tonnes of ro-ro cargo (-1.2%) and 89.1 million tonnes tonnes of other goods (-0.9%).