Azov-Black Sea basin became key transport and logistics hub in European part of country – Delo Group
In the Northwest, container turnover fell by over 50%
The Azov-Black Sea basin became the key transport and logistics center in the European part of Russia due to timely investments in port and logistics infrastructure, increase of ferry services and launch of new sea routes. On October 21, Sergey Shishkarev, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Delo Group, said at the panel session of the "Made in Russia" international forum, according to the Group's press release.
In his opinion, it was caused, on the one hand, by the decrease of cargo turnover in the ports of the Baltic basin, and on the other hand, the Azov-Black Sea basin proved to be infrastructurally prepared to receive the increased cargo flow. “In the Northwest, the volumes are stagnating, they have decreased significantly since the beginning of the year, we are already facing a decline of more than 50%, particularly in container turnover.
It would be a great achievement to stabilize the volumes in the south of Russia and maybe even increase them slightly.
Our container terminal NUTEP in Novorossiysk not only maintained its throughput at a level of 2021, but its share in the total container turnover in the country increased by 2.8 percentage points to 12.7%," - said Sergey Shishkarev.
The Azov-Black Sea basin must constantly develop at an outstripping pace regardless of crisis situations. Given an example, Sergey Shishkarev turned to KSK Grain Terminal. Reconstruction of this terminal was completed in 2021 with the launch of the most high-capacity and deep-water berth №40A. It is equipped to accept grain-carrying vessels with a capacity of over 100 thousand tons. The investment decisions made by the Group several years ago have provided additional annual handling volumes of up to 6 million tons of grain.
According to the Head of the Board of Group, it is impossible to operate reliably in sea basins, relying only on foreign sea cargo carriers. This year the Group acquired the Sakhalin Shipping Company (SASCO) and actively develops new sea routes: “Today the Group operates 28 vessels; we have organized our own routes to three ports in Turkey and India. We have reached Israel and we work with the Emirates and Saudi Arabia in a test mode via Istanbul. I hope in the next few months we will launch a service to Vietnam,” he said.
Major international operators including Maersk, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), CMA CGM, Hapag Lloyd and ONE stopped calling at Russian ports after the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. Container flows have turned from the North-West to the Sout and the Far East of Russia. Read more in IAA PortNews’ article What does eastward pivot bring?
Thanks to the outstanding organization of the test ferry processing at the NUTEP terminal, with the support of the Russian Export Center, the Ministry of Transport and Rospotrebnadzor, the Group intends to increase the number of processed trucks: “All bottlenecks are identified, and we aim to process 1 ferry with 100 cars per 1 day”, the Founder of the Group said.
Delo Group is Russian transportation and logistics holding, operating its own fleet and managing sea container terminals in the Azov-Black Sea, Baltic and Far Eastern basins, a network of railway container terminals, a fleet of containers and fitting platforms. The parent company of the Group is Delo Management Company.
The Group's stevedoring business includes DeloPorts holding and Global Ports, a leading container terminal operator. The transport and logistics business of the Group is made up of the multimodal transport operator RUSCON and the intermodal container operator TransContainer. The shipping business is represented by the Sakhalin Shipping Company (SASCO), is one of the biggest Russian shipping companies.
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