During the first three quarters of the current year, Ukraine’s harbours increased their aggregate container handling volume by 20.7% year-on-year to 713,440 TEU
The figures come from Ukraine’s Sea Ports Authority (USPA), a branch of the country’s Infrastructure Ministry.
For the first time in recent years, export container traffic, at 348,079 TEU (up 19.2%), exceeded imports of 339,034 TEU (up 22.4%). Transit container traffic was up by 18.6% to 26,327 TEU throughout the nine months period.
The so-called Big Odessa ports – Odessa proper, Pivdenny and Chornomorsk – handled most of the business, respectively 65.9%, 20.3% and 13.7% of total throughput.
Odessa’s volume went up by 10.8% to 470,857 TEU, including 232,110 TEU of imports (up 6.5%), 217,937 TEU of exports (up 15.4%) and 20,810 TEU in transit (up 14.4%).
Pivdenny’s throughput soared by 87.8% y/y to 144,985 TEU over the period, comprising 73,042 TEU of imports (up 83.2%), 66,426 TEU of exports (up 98.2%) and 5,517 TEU in transit (up 45.5%).
Chornomorsk handled 97,506 TEU (up 9.9%), including 54,613 TEU of exports (up 0.1%) and 42,893 TEU of imports (up 25.4%).
The traffic is represented by 400,404 containers (+ 19.2%), indicating a high 40ft propensity, while containerised tonnage increased 18.2% year on year to 9.133 Mt.
In 2018, all the Ukrainian seaports handled 846,485 TEU, up 18.7% on 2017.
A major factor behind the recent growth is the launch of new rail container services linking the ports with the country’s key regional centres.
The overall CI is still relatively low, however. In the first three quarters of this year, overall general cargo traffic increased by 6.2% year-on-year to 21.393 Mt. Total (all cargoes) throughput was up by 19% to 114.52 Mt.
https://www.worldcargonews.com/news/news/ukraine-container-traffic-considerable-growth–63170