HAMBURG: At a Chinese business summit here last fall, local officials boasted that this port city was “consolidating its position as China’s gateway to European trade.” Today, that position offers less to brag about.
China is by far the biggest trading partner for Hamburg, the largest port in the world’s fourth-biggest economy. Last year, one of every three containers in Hamburg harbor was coming from or heading to China.
This year through June that flow dropped 11%, to 1.3 million containers to and from China, the port authority said last week, blaming it on China’s economic slowdown as well as a collapse in trade with Russia. Hamburg’s world-wide volume of containers could fall more than 7% this year, the agency said.
Hamburg-based shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd AG said Wednesday that its world-wide volume of cargo in the first half of this year fell 3%, adjusted for a recent merger, due to “weak economic growth in Latin America and the clear slowdown in growth in China.” China’s economic outlook increases uncertainty for the full year, Hapag-Lloyd said.
Hamburg more broadly is recalibrating its expectations of demand from China.
“We benefited a lot in recent years,” Corinna Nienstedt, director of the international division at the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce—which organizes the biennial Hamburg Summit with China—said Tuesday. “Now the situation has become much more normal.”
Hamburg’s focus on China is a microcosm of the German economy, which took a hit from the 2008 financial crisis but rebounded strongly on the back of booming trade with fast-growing emerging markets. Germany’s economy relies heavily on exports and, unlike most major Western countries, it runs a large trade surplus.
