Half year 2020 results for the Port of Basel
Port of Basel - Traffic fown by 16% in 2020
L’Antenne reports that the Swiss port of Basel has experienced a difficult first half of 2020. It shows a decline of 15.7%, resulting in a total of 2.7 million tonnes transported. The gateway to Switzerland from Rotterdam, has suffered in particular from its heavy dependence on petroleum products. As the health crisis caused their consumption to fall, their imports fell significantly, by 16.5%, or 1.26 million tonnes.
Other traffics also recorded decreases, of varying magnitude: manufactured items resisted the best (- 4%, total of 234,000 tonnes), unlike metallurgical products which collapsed by 30% (102,000 tonnes), in the context of the suspension of car factories in France and Italy and an industrial slowdown in Switzerland.
Chemicals traffic fell by almost half (124,600 tonnes), but construction remained more insensitive to the effects of the pandemic, but their activity still fell by 10% to reach 520,400 tonnes. Cereals and other food products experienced a second quarter in growth but not enough to compensate for their decline in the first, resulting in a decrease of 7% over the six-month period, to 349,500 tonnes.
The Swiss economy, has also suffered from the persistent tensions between the United States and China. This issue has affected container traffic, especially in May and June, where it fell by 20.7% and 16.6% respectively compared to the same months in 2019. Over the half-year as a whole, the decrease reached 11%, for a total of 56,100 TEU. The port of Basel does not risk a prediction for the second part of the year: it is monitoring a possible second wave of Covid-19, as well as a potential low level of the Rhine which would further complicate the situation.