WILMINGTON: Driven by strong container traffic growth at the Port of Wilmington, North Carolina’s ports are on pace to finish the current fiscal year on a financial high.
With plenty of room to grow in Wilmington, port officials are hoping to keep the trucks rolling into and out of the facility at the end of Shipyard Boulevard for years to come.
But Paul Cozza, executive director of the NC State Ports Authority, said maintaining the 7 percent growth rate in container traffic that the port has seen in recent years will be challenging, especially with ports in neighbouring states projecting flat or much lower growth numbers for next year.
Still, with an aggressive marketing plan and with momentum from the nearly 20 percent spike in container traffic year-over-year the port has seen in recent months – in large part thanks to the now-solved labour woes affecting West Coast ports – he said the building blocks are there for Wilmington to capture more of the container traffic market.
The port handled nearly 136,000 containers for the first 10 months of the 2014-15 fiscal year, which started July 1, compared with just under 114,000 for the same period last fiscal year. Cozza’s comments came during Wednesday’s meeting in Wilmington of the authority’s board of directors.
The board also heard that the ports had net income of $3.1 million through April, which was a dramatic turnabout to the $100,000 loss officials had projected last year when they put together the ports’ budget forecast for the 2014-15 fiscal year.
Port officials said they expected revenue to continue growing next year, fuelled not only by increased container traffic but the start-up of Enviva’s wood pellet-handling facility in Wilmington.
