AO Sea Port of St. Petersburg (SP SPb, a company of UCL Holding) says it handled over 3.8 million tonnes in the first half of 2018, which represents a 5% growth on the same period a year earlier.
The growth was driven primarily by increased handling of metal scrap, mineral fertilizers in big bags, petcoke and containers. The company has created dedicated sites for their storage and transshipment as well as required storage infrastructure to let the customers accumulate optimal shiploads and, consequently, manage their logistics costs.
In the reporting period, SP SPb more than doubled handling of metal scrap, to 433,000 tonnes. The company also continued to increase handling of big bags with mineral fertilizers — their volume surged by 68% to over 185,000 tonnes. Handling of petcoke totaled almost 129,000 tonnes (this type of cargo was not handled in the same period of the previous year).
Solid growth was seen in the segment of container handling — up 24% to 15,500 TEUs. The result should be attributed to the development of SP SPb’s container service. Apart from standard transshipment operations, it offers additional container handling solutions.
Ferrous metal still makes the bulk of the port’s cargo flow. In H1’2018 it remained flat, year-on-year, at over 2 million tonnes accounting for more than 53% of the company’s total throughput. SP SPb handles about 10 types of this cargo.
Other cargoes showed mixed dynamics. Transshipment of general cargo climbed by 1% to over 3.4 million tonnes while transshipment of loose/bulk cargo surged 2.7 times to 202,000 tonnes.
Exports via SP SPb grew by 8%, year-on-year to 3.67 million tonnes, while imports dropped by 35% to 0.14 million tonnes. Exports account for 96% of the company’s throughput, imports – for 4%.
AO Sea Port of Saint-Petersburg (a company of UCL Port – stevedoring division of the International Transportation Group UCL Holding) is the largest operator, rendering services on handling of all types of dry cargoes at Big Port St. Petersburg. It operates modern multipurpose specialized terminals for handling of general and bulk cargoes and specialized terminals for ro-ro cargoes and containers. In 2017, SP SPb handled 6.9 million tonnes of cargo.