The improvement was mostly driven by the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, which handled 24.9m teu in 2014, an 11.1% increase over 2013. Of these, the Middle East demonstrated the highest growth of 11.8%, handling 15.2m teu.
Meanwhile capacity coming online at the UK’s London Gateway and Embraport in Brazil contributed 0.9% to overall growth. In the Asia Pacific and the Indian Subcontinent regions, volume grew by 8.9%, to 27.8m teu, while Americas and Australia grew by 1.6% to 7.0m teu.
“We believe we have once again outperformed the expected 2014 market growth of approximately 5%,” said chairman Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem. “Our new developments at London Gateway and Embraport contributed to our excellent 2014 performance.
“Given the strong volume performance in 2014, we expect to meet full year market expectations. As we look ahead into 2015 we have a number of exciting developments, including new capacity coming on stream in The Netherlands, Turkey, India and The United Arab Emirates, the development of a logistics hub in Belgium and further integrated ports and logistics solutions for our customers with the completion of our JAFZA acquisition.
“Although some of our terminals continue to operate in a challenging macro environment, market conditions across the portfolio are expected to be generally favourable in 2015. This coupled with the addition of new capacity, stands us in good stead for volume growth in line or slightly ahead of the market this year.”
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