Pbeautiful port terminals! Large container ship owners are snapping them up, and governments are preventing too many foreign investors, especially Chinese, from buying them. Ports have become increasingly strategic assets as globalization has led to an increase in trade, especially through container shipping. These entry and re-shipment points, through which 90% of the planet’s solid and liquid goods transit, are essential for States, concerned about their sovereignty, and for shipowners, who thus guarantee their activities.
First the shipowners. They want to control the handling and storage areas in the large port “hubs”, to be able to unload and reload without waiting at the ports. Indeed, immobilizing a ship is very expensive. “For a container ship that transports 24,000 containers, we are talking about one hundred thousand dollars a day”indicates Rodolphe Saadé, president and CEO of the French CMA CGM, in an interview with Echoes since September 24. And, in Brazil, waiting times can last ten days.
This is the main reason why the Saadé group has just acquired, for 1.8 billion euros, almost half of Santos Brasil, the first Brazilian port operator with more than 40% of the entries and exits of the “boxes” of the country, whose goal is to eventually take full control. The interest of this emerging power, according to Rodolphe Saadé, lies in its position as both an importer and an exporter, which makes it possible to balance flows.
This operation occurs after the purchase, in 2021, of the Fenix Marine Services terminal in Los Angeles-Long Beach, the largest US port, for almost 2,000 million euros; then, in 2023, from Global Container Terminals, which manages the main terminals of the port of New York-New Jersey. And its acquisitions will not stop there, warns the head of CMA CGM.
Diversify the activity
The world’s number one, the Italian-Swiss Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), also weaves its network, from Trieste (Italy) to Valencia (Spain), from Abidjan to San Pedro (Ivory Coast) and from Barcelona to Haven. It will invest one billion euros in the port of Normandy to handle more containers. In Hamburg (Germany) it competed with the German shipowner Hapag-Lloyd for the acquisition of the stevedoring company HHLA. In total, its subsidiary TIL operates seventy container terminals, with the same objectives as CMA CGM: to offer a fast and reliable service to its clients in industry and large-scale distribution.
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