Port traffic exceeds 181 million tonnes in the first four months of the year
- The movement of bulk solids and liquids grew by 3.5% and 0.3%, respectively.
- Passenger traffic exceeded 9 million, 47.3% higher than in the same period of the previous year.
23-05-2023 (Spanish State Ports Public Body). Freight traffic through the 46 ports of general interest of the State reached 181,517,886 tonnes between January and April of this year, a decrease of 2.1% compared with the same period in 2022. The slowdown in world trade, within the context of uncertainty and sluggishness in the main economies, has meant that shipping companies using the Iberian peninsula as a logistics platform to send their goods to third countries have had to downsize their operations, causing a fall of almost 4% in goods in transit, with a loss of almost 2 million tonnes.
Despite the decrease in total traffic, both solid bulks, with 31.3 million tonnes, and liquid bulks, with 60.2 million tonnes, experienced increases of +3.5% and +0.3%, respectively. In the case of solid bulks, this was due to the rebound in the movement of coal (+42%) to over 7.8 million tonnes, and cereals and their flours (+27%), which exceeded 6.3 million tonnes. Among liquid bulks, the movement of gasoil increased by +16% to over 7.2 million tonnes.
General cargo traffic, as has been the case in previous months, has fallen in containerised shipments (-8.6%), due to the drop in transit, which has had a significant impact on this type of traffic. However, the conventional freight format continues to grow (+3%), bringing the total to 85.3 million tonnes.
On the other hand, the increase in new vehicles (+39%) to more than one million units, was once again worthy of note.
Passenger traffic continues its growth trend, both scheduled (+33%) and cruise (+96%), bringing the total number of passengers to just over 9 million people in the first 4 months of the year, an increase of 47.3% compared to the same period last year.
The number of ships grew by 7% in the accumulated period and by 7.4% with respect to the total number of GTs. In total, 47,272 ships and 797.7 million GTs