Container throughput in the Port of Rotterdam increased by 4.6% by weight to 35.9 million tonnes and 6.1% by volume to 3.5 million TEUs. This increase continues from last year and is caused by increased throughput performance of the port’s large container terminals.
In the first quarter of 2018, less freight passed through the Port of Rotterdam than in the same period last year. On the other hand, growth in container throughput continued to increase significantly, 6.1% in TEU, 4.6% in tonnes).
Liquid bulk
Liquid bulk throughput had a slight growth of 0.5% to 55.9 million tonnes. In the first quarter, the throughput of LNG was much higher than last year, with a record volume of over 500,000 tonnes in February. This growth concerned both the supply and distribution of LNG.
Dry bulk
Within the dry bulk segment, iron ore & scrap and coal are the main commodities. The throughput of both fell slightly. The fall in coal is largely because of the decrease in supply for power plants as a consequence of last year’s closure of older power plants in Germany and the Netherlands.
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Containers
Container throughput increased 4.6% by weight to 35.9 million tonnes and 6.1% by volume to 3.5 million TEU. This growth is a continuation of the increase from last year. This caused feeder volumes to increase significantly by 7.5% to 0.6 million TEU. An increasing exchange is also happening between deep sea services. New connections with the eastern section of the Mediterranean also led to an increase in shortsea throughput by 6.9% .
Ro-Ro and other general cargo
The total throughput in the breakbulk segment decreases by 4.7% to 7.2 million tonnes. Ro-Ro traffic increased slightly by 0.8% to 5.8 million tonnes compared with the first quarter of last year, because of an expansion of RoRo vessel handling capacity at one of the Rotterdam terminals. The throughput of other cargo was lower than the first quarter of 2017.