Ports: Le Havre and the Seine did not take advantage of the enchanted parenthesis of sea freight

While the world’s major shipowners had an extraordinary year, shattering their previous profit records to the point of attracting many comments on their “superprofits” the trickle-down effect was very insignificant for their points of attachment, the major European ports.

Thus Haropa, the new entity formed in 2021 with the port assets of Le Havre, Rouen and the Paris region, can certainly boast of a traffic increase of 2% in 2022, to 85.1 million tonnes transported to the port. import and export. But the fourth northern European port, “which is doing better than resisting”, according to the chairman of the executive board Stéphane Raison, is more pleased with its good resilience in difficult times than with a boom in its activity.

Lots of empty containers

In detail, growth came above all from liquid bulk transport (+5%), driven by crude oil, and of an exceptional cereal campaign (+12% over one year). The flagship activity of container traffic – so publicized since the global health crisis – has shown itself to be much wiser, even in decline. In terms of the number of containers handled, the results are stable: the three ports handled 3.1 million “boxes”, or +0.3% over one year. But in tonnage, annual traffic fell by 5% to 28.4 million tonnes.

Explanation of this discrepancy: at certain times, “we handled a lot more empty containers than full ones. The annual report reflects a rebalancing, even if at the end of the year the number of containers is the same”, according to Stéphane Raison. Moreover, the receipts of the three ports do not rise like that of the shipowners: “Our price is made up of the number of calls and the size of the ships, which forms the taxable volume. However, we have lost a lot of stopovers due to the gigantism of the ships”, explains the manager.

Accumulation of exogenous shocks

The latter nevertheless admits to being satisfied with its commercial figures, “in a context of an overall drop in container traffic in the ports of the Northern range”. As the “above ground” results of the shipowners do not indicate, “2022 was marked by an unprecedented accumulation of exogenous shocks, it is a year that it would be better not to reproduce”, analyzes Daniel Havis, the president of the Supervisory Board.

In this context of global economic downturn, Haropa says it is above all confident about its “change of scale” and about the development of a new strategy . In port terms, the major shipowner MSC announced last year a major investment in Le Havre, amounting to 700 million, aimed at creating 900 direct jobs.

With soon 20 unloading gantries reserved, against 11 today, the Italian-Swiss shipowner will soon be able to handle 4.5 million containers a year in Upper Normandy, against 1.5 million currently. “One million containers represents a total of 6,000 to 10,000 jobs,” predicts Stéphane Raison.

Investments on the rise

Backed by financial support from the State expressed at the beginning of 2021, Haropa welcomes a record level of investment 555 million euros last year, including 251 million public and 304 from the private sector. What to push the lights in two axes of development: to create “a carbon-free industrial ecosystem”, by supporting various green projects of industrialists as in Gennevilliers or Port-Jérôme, and to structure “a multimodal logistics corridor”, to process via the Seine the goods from all over the world to Ile-de-France the first national consumption basin.

But things only move at the speed of a bulk carrier: leaving Le Havre, trucks still carried out almost 87% of container transport last year (88% the previous year), rail and river dividing up the rest.