From Yantian (鹽田) to Hamburg, world trade is in the doldrums and Christian Blauert, who heads the largest container terminal in Germany’s northern port of Hamburg, need only check the Web cams to knows things aren’t getting better.
On his computer he has access to a live-feed of pictures from Chinese harbors like Yantian showing mountains of empty containers, waiting for exports to pick up.
“The situation in the international port of Yantian is typical,” referring to the site near Hong Kong. “You can hardly see the full containers because the terminals are crowded with empties.”
The pictures illustrate that when the container ships come steaming into Hamburg from China, in six to seven weeks’ time after going round Africa to save paying Suez Canal transit fees, they will be carrying far fewer TV sets, bicycles, T-shirts and toothbrushes than at the same time last year.
At the HHLA (Hamburger Hafen und Logistik Aktiengesellschaft) Burchardkai terminal, where giant cranes on rails dominate the skyline, Blauert declines to say when business might pick up.
“It’s like navigating in the fog, you can only see what’s just ahead,” he says.
His firm expects turnover to be down by more than 10 percent this year because of the economic downturn and a number of HHLA’s 3,700 Hamburg employees will be facing short-time work as of this summer.
Axel Gedashko, economy minister in the city-state about 100km down river from the North Sea, does not mince his words: “The situation is dramatic,” he says.
“Trade in volume in the port of Hamburg is down by a quarter compared to last year” when nearly 10 million TEU (twenty foot equivalent unit), the figure used for calculating the number of containers shipped, went through the harbor, Gedashko says.
Shipping these days in Hamburg — Germany’s largest port and Europe’s second-largest after Rotterdam — is all about containers because 97 percent of goods are moved that way.
China was Hamburg’s most important trading partner last year, accounting for 32 percent in volume of the 140 million tonnes shipped through the port. Singapore came second, followed by Russia.
The world crisis “is hitting us badly because the port is at the center of logistics for northern Germany,” Gedashko says.
“And the situation here reflects the state of the world economy, not just in Hamburg and Germany, but for the whole of eastern Europe” because Hamburg, especially since the fall of the Iron Curtain, serves as the gateway for much of central and northern Europe, he says.
In this city-state of 1.8 million people, unemployment is up to 78,000, including 10,000 in the logistics sector, with at least 30,000 more on short-time, Gedashko says.
The city is worried. A poll by the Haspa bank showed 30 percent of firms connected with the harbor expect a bad year, 60 percent stagnation and just 6 percent think business will be good.
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