MILAN: Traffic of goods through Italian ports totaled 484 million tonnes in 2016, the highest level since 2009 (to go even higher you have to look back to 2008: 509 million tonnes).
At the global level, maritime transport has gone beyond the 10 billion tonne threshold for the first time, of which the Mediterranean area represents 20%.
These figures are included in the “Italian maritime economy” report by the SRM study center (Intesa Sanpaolo group), which will be presented tomorrow in Naples. Massimo Deandreis, SRM Director-General, said that from the analysis it emerged that “from 2012 to today, the presence of container ships in the Mediterranean with a size bigger than 7,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) has increased by more than 21%.”
More in detail, the presence of big ships in the three main Italian ports for containers (Gioia Tauro – which does transhipment, Genoa and La Spezia) “has grown overall, between 2012 to today, by 86.4%.” In particular, “in Genoa, the presence of container ships has doubled (+99.4%)” in the period. This trend involves big ships that have substituted smaller ones.
According to the report, China “has invested about €4 billion in six ports of the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. Cosco (the biggest Chinese shipping company) will carry out investments in the Greek port of Piraeus worth €1.5 billion. Chinese firms are also looking at investing in Northern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean (Israel and Turkey).
Faced with all of this, therefore, Italy has an additional opportunity, according to Deandreis: that of “proposing itself as a strategic loading and unloading point and a logistical hub for the silk ships, that is the ships that travel the new Silk Road; strengthened also by the fact that China “is one of Italy’s biggest partners in terms of maritime imports and exports, with a value of trade in 2016 of more than €27 billion.”
