Spanish container trade data for September 2020 slightly down

Recent data from Puertos del Estado for September 2020 show that the number of containers imported or exported to or from Spanish ports plus the container traffic between Spanish ports (cabotage) went slightly down after a few positive months since the dramatic decrease of April 2020 (almost minus 17%).

Traffic in September decreased by a 1.7% when compared to August and is over 7% lower when compared to September 2019. However, a decrease in September is rather usual, as happened all past 13 years with decreases ranging from -0.6% to -6.3%.

When we have a look at the major ports: Algeciras, Barcelona, and Valencia, we observe that Algeciras improved its Month-on-Month performance for import, export, and cabotage (+34.2%) as well as transhipment, Barcelona handled more transhipment (+7.2%) and Valencia moved less in both categories and saw its total volume decrease by 5.2%. However, compared to last year Valencia increased its total volume by 12.2% and registered its best September ever.

Source: Data from Puertos del Estado elaborated by CLAUpartners consulting

Container import, export and cabotage volumes for Spain reached 622 thousand TEU in September, which is like the volumes for January and February.

When we compare the COVID-19 crisis with the financial crisis that started in September 2008, we see a much stronger recovery today than happened then, as illustrated by the following graph with the index for import, export and cabotage traffic for all Spanish ports, setting the index of the volume handled at 100 at the start of the period.

Source: Data from Puertos del Estado elaborated by CLAUpartners consulting

Let us see what the data for October will bring us. Historically, it is almost always a better month than September!

For more details on container trade and other port statistics, please contact me at consulting@claupartners.com