Gdańsk is causing increasing problems for Hamburg, Poland’s biznesalert.pl website reported on Tuesday, citing Germany’s public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR).
Over the past few months, there has been heated discussion in Germany about the involvement of the Chinese conglomerate COSCO in the construction of Tollerort, a new container terminal in Hamburg, biznesalert.pl noted.
COSCO originally planned to acquire a 35 percent stake in the project, giving it a say in key decisions; however, despite strong backing from the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the coalition government in Berlin only approved the sale of a 24.9 percent share in Tollerort, which is too small to influence key decisions, according to biznesalert.pl.
The website noted that so far, COSCO hasn’t said if it will accept Germany’s offer.
Gdańsk “naturally wins out” against Hamburg
Meanwhile, NDR reporters have obtained internal documents of the Hamburg port authority, HHLA (Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG, biznesalert.pl also wrote.
According to this material, HHLA has been in bad condition for some time, losing its competitive edge due to high costs and low mechanisation of its transshipment infrastructure, biznesalert.pl reported.
HHLA is especially struggling when it comes to container transport; internal documents point to rival ports in the Netherlands and Belgium as having the upper hand, as well as Poland’s northern Gdańsk harbour, which is “causing Hamburg increasing problems,” according to the Polish website.
According to biznesalert.pl, competition from Gdańsk may have been one of the reasons behind's Scholz's strong support for COSCO's bigger involvement in the construction of the new container terminal in Hamburg.
To become competitive again, HHLA will have to modernise itself, become more flexible and likely offload several hundred workers, biznesalert.pl wrote.
Yet Hamburg’s problems are much more serious, according to experts, the website added.
The entry to the port leads through the river Elbe, which is too shallow for the giant containers that have dominated the market; some of these large and heavily loaded vessels must first unload some of their containers, which makes transhipment at Hamburg even more expensive and less efficient, to the point of being totally redundant, according to biznesalert.pl.
Deep water ports such as Gdańsk or Amsterdam pose no such problems and naturally win out against Hamburg, biznesalert.pl reported on Monday.
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Source: biznesalert.pl, thetimes.co.uk