We Believe In India's Growth Story And Like To Be Part Of It.

Port of Antwerp, the most promising port in Europe, is expanding infrastructure in line with growing cargo volumes. Jacques Vandermeiren, CEO, of the port, in a one-to-one with Ramprasad, Editor-in-Chief, Maritime Gateway, details on the expansion plans of the port and their interest to be part of India’s growth story.

Q Port of Antwerp has shown some interesting growth in 2017. What has been driving this growth?

The growth we have posted this year is a continuation from the previous years (2015&16). In Europe you will notice that other ports are not doing that well compared to the Port of Antwerp, in the last two years. The main driver of growth is the confidence of customers in our services and we are sure this growth will continue in the years to come. But we have, of course, to tackle our challenges and one of them is the congestion within the port, and especially when it comes to containers we have seen that we had a few difficult months. This was particularly due to the move from right bank to the left bank, which is an impressive movement within a port. Our growth figures would have been even stronger, but we lost a bit of transhipment to other ports in Western Europe, but we hope we can get them back.

Moving cargo to the harbour and then shipping it to Rotterdam was difficult, mainly due to the difficulties at the inbuilt terminal at the beginning of this year. But we saw huge volumes coming in and it took them about six months to organise themselves. Due to this congestion we lost some teus to other ports. But other segments like Ro-Ro and liquid bulk have shown very strong figures this year.

Q The rate of growth the port has posted over the last few years must have put a lot of pressure on the capacities and infrastructure. Do you have any plans to boost capacities?

We are planning to increase container capacity within the port.