Container traffic soars in Malaga port due to Suez Canal crisis

The arrival of this type of freight traffic in the city has grown by 500% so far this year

Ignacio Lillo

Málaga

Monday, 7 October 2024, 15:59

For months now, the arrival of large container ships has been repeated week after week, with hardly any interruptions. Preliminary data, known months ago, already pointed to a significant growth in this strategic traffic for the port of Malaga.

Now, nine months into 2024, Noatum, the concessionaire of Pier 9 (specialising in this type of cargo) has confirmed that the figures have experienced an exponential increase. "We work with three shipping lines: Hapag-Lloyd, MSC and Maersk, and in terms of container traffic we have been growing by almost 500% this year," said César Cegarra, director of the Malaga terminal.

This means that Malaga now handles between 15,000 and 16,000 TEU containers (twenty-foot equivalent units) per month. "It is easy to say that when you have fallen a lot before, but it is true that we are now recovering the volumes of good years, and we are trying to keep up, in the face of the great competition from Algeciras. "We are competing in the big leagues, with monsters that have a lot of cranes compared to us, who are small but just as good as our competitors", assured the manager.

Cegarra acknowledges that the current upward surge in requests for berthing of large container ships started because of the war crisis in and around the Suez Canal. "It has given us the opportunity, and now we have to show how good we are at consolidating all those cargoes.

"We always want to grow more, although that is a good figure, and we are looking for ways to keep growing". To do this, the next milestone will be in Madrid, at the Fruit Attraction fair, where Noatum wants to go hand in hand with the large importers and exporters of perishable fruit, such as avocado, mango and lemon, from the Axarquia region. As this specialist in the world of logistics recalls, the headquarters of the main companies and cooperatives are in Vélez-Málaga, just a few kilometres from the capital, "and we are working to consolidate these loads from the port of Málaga".

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