“We are seeing 14 per cent growth year over year . . . and we’ve now seen 21 consecutive months, or seven quarters, of growth,” Lane Farguson, a spokesman for the Halifax Port Authority, said in an interview Friday.
Ports measure their container cargo in terms of formerly standard, 20-foot-long containers called TEUs. In the first quarter of this year, the Port of Halifax saw 130,803 TEUs of container cargo, up 14 per cent compared to the same period last year.
Although the start of the year is typically a slower time for container traffic, the Port of Halifax’s volume of container cargo was 3.7 per cent higher in the first quarter of this year than the 126,178 TEUs that came through the port in the last quarter of 2016.
Non-containerized, or bulk, cargo is also up at the local port, rising by four per cent to 67,424 metric tonnes in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year.
The bottom line is that total cargo tonnage through the Port of Halifax increased by 13 per cent, to just less than 1.13 million metric tonnes, in the first three months of 2017 compared to same period last year.
“It’s momentum that we’re happy to see,” said Farguson. “We’re in a growth cycle and that’s good . . . It means jobs.”
In the past two years, Halifax Port Authority officials have worked to minimize transit times, reduce operating costs, mitigate risks and add value to port users moving goods through Halifax.
That’s paid off. In January this year, the biggest container cargo shipping line in the Caribbean, Tropical Shipping, decided to ditch the Port of Saint John for Halifax.
“Halifax just offered a lot more connectivity to global carriers and to intermodal opportunities,” Gordon Cole, Tropical Shipping’s assistant vice-president, said in an interview in January.
The arrival of Tropical’s vessels is one of the drivers of the growth in container traffic at the Port of Halifax. Another is Atlantic Container Line’s move to bigger, G4 ships such as the Atlantic Star, which called on the local port in November last year. The shipping line boasts that these vessels are the first of their kind and biggest, multipurpose, roll-on, roll-off, container ships ever built.
“They incorporate an innovative design that increases capacity without significantly changing the dimensions of the vessel,” the company states on its website. “The G4s are bigger, greener and more efficient than their predecessors. The (roll-on, roll-off) decks are higher (up to 7.4 metres) with fewer columns, enabling easier loading and discharge of oversized cargo.”
With that shipping line using these bigger vessels, the company is working hard to fill them up and that means more container cargo for the Port of Halifax, said Farguson.
In 2016, profits almost doubled at the Halifax Port Authority as shipping lines brought in more cargo and the cruise ship industry surged ahead.
“It was a strong year across all our lines,” said Paul MacIsaac, the port authority’s senior vice-president, earlier this year. “All types of cargo were up and cruise ships were strong as well.”
In 2016, the cruise ship industry brought 238,000 passengers, a 7.2-per cent jump from the previous year, as 136 vessels called on the Port of Halifax.
Container terminals saw their biggest year since the great recession of 2008-09, when the American economy tanked in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, in 2016. And non-containerized cargo also rose, by 16.2 per cent, to roughly 4.46 million metric tonnes last year.
The port authority’s revenues grew by almost $5.4 million last year, or about 15.2 per cent, to $40.8 million from slightly more than $35.4 million in 2015.
According to its most recent annual report, the port authority has $207 million in assets and invested $8.15 million in them last year, primarily on its terminals, which benefited from $4.2 million in investments. Other investments were also made on the grain elevator and the port authority’s information technology.
http://thechronicleherald.ca/business/1461962-growth-at-port-of-halifax-%E2%80%94-again
