German terminal operator Eurogate has announced that it recorded a 13% rise in its 2015 net operating profit despite a drop in its total container handling volumes.
The company’s net profit went up from €64.9m in 2014 to €73m last year, with its revenue increasing by 4% to €591m in 2015 from €566m in 2014 and its investments going down by 54% to €17.6m in 2015 from €38.4m in 2014.
In October 2015, the group’s subsidiary Eurogate International GmbH announced the acquisition of a 16.67% shareholding in the São Paulo-based shipping company Contrail Logística S.A., which offers transport services for the hinterland of Santos, where Brazil’s largest seaport is located.
Eurogate reported an increase of almost 35% in the number of vessels over 10,000 teu calling at its German container facilities in Bremerhaven, Wilhelmshaven and Hamburg, to a total of 618 ports of call, of which 201 had a capacity of over 18,000 teu.
The German operator said in a statement that it “sees a high level of potential here for leveraging synergies with the trade lanes of its shipping customers that have Santos as a scheduled port of call”.
The operator’s total volume of containers handled across the group went down by 2% year-on-year to 14.5m teu in 2015, which the company said is “in line with the market development as the total handling volume for the German seaports declined by 2% in 2015 as well.
Eurogate Container Terminal Wilhelmshaven, which is Germany’s only deep-water container terminal, recorded a 536% increase year-on-year in its container handling volumes to 426,751 teu in 2015 from 67,076 teu in 2014.
However, Eurogate’s two other German terminals did not do as well. Bremerhaven recorded a 4.3% drop in its container handling volumes to 5.5m teu in 2015 from 5.8m teu in 2014, while the operator’s Hamburg terminal recorded a negligible 0.5% rise to 2.3m teu.
The total volume of containers handled at its North Range ports recorded a 1.6% decline. The company’s Italian terminals recorded a 5.5% drop in container handling volumes from 5m teu in 2014 to 4.8m teu last year.
The group’s terminals in Russia and Morocco recorded a negative year, with container handling volumes falling by 17% in Ust-Luga and 9% in Tangier.
Eurogate’s facilities in Lisbon, Portugal, recorded a 5.6% year-on-year rise in container throughput in 2015 from 196,360 teu in 2014 to 207,317 teu last year.
Emanuel Schiffer, chairman of the Eurogate Group management board said in a statement: “Despite this positive result we cannot hide the fact that the market conditions in our industry have become more difficult. The global economy has lost its momentum. Consequently, the volume of goods being traded internationally is down, which leads among other things to a general slowdown in global container handling at the seaports.”
As he added, the industry is currently challenged by a mature market characterised by highly intense competition.
According to Schiffer, while shipping lines responded to this with ever bigger vessels of >18,000 teu capacity, terminal operators face challenges in coping with the resulting peak handling periods.
“We need to be able to offer our customers high levels of productivity to ensure that deploying ULCVs delivers the results our customers are looking for,” he added.
Source: Container Management
Source: Container Management