<\/p>\n
Freight volumes in the Port of Rotterdam fell 6.9% in 2020 because of the coronavirus crisis, the biggest drop in about a decade but smaller than had been expected, Europe\u2019s largest sea port said on Friday.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The port’s Chief Executive Allard Castelein told reporters he expected a recovery that began in the second half of 2020 to continue this year but said throughput was not expected to reach pre-crisis levels in 2021.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The fall in traffic in 2020 was the largest since 2009, taking throughput down to levels last seen in 2011, he said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Traffic took a big hit in the first phase of the pandemic, as trade, particularly with China, almost came to a halt and the port had warned about a possible 20% drop in traffic for the whole year.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But trading improved during the second half of the year, even as many economies went back into lockdown, so the impact from COVID-19 was not as big feared during the whole period.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Overall, trade volumes fell in all segments last year, with the largest decreases in iron ore, coal, crude oil and mineral oil products, the port said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The amount of goods brought to Rotterdam in containers only fell 1% as home-bound consumers flocked to online shopping.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Bart Meijer; Editing by Edmund Blair)<\/p>\n
maritime professional<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Freight volumes in the Port of Rotterdam fell 6.9% in 2020 because of the coronavirus crisis, the biggest drop in about a decade but smaller than had been expected, Europe\u2019s largest sea port said on Friday. The port’s Chief Executive Allard Castelein told reporters he expected a recovery that began in the second half of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[2479,1727,1260,1463,2164,953,275,1821,1259],"class_list":["post-25696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news","tag-biggest","tag-decade","tag-drop","tag-expected","tag-freight","tag-port","tag-rotterdam","tag-smaller","tag-volumes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/25697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}