A December ship collision that damaged loading equipment at Westshore Terminals took a bite out of Port Metro Vancouver (PMV)’s 2012 growth.
According to PMV’s just-released 2012 annual results, the port’s growth slowed to 1% in 2012, down from 3.4% in 2011.
Robin Silvester, PMV president and CEO, said the Westshore incident dampened PMV’s overall results, given the significance of having the port’s largest coal-handling berth out of commission for much of December.
Silvester noted that coal represents about a quarter of the port’s total cargo volumes, and that the damaged Westshore berth is the largest of the port’s four coal-handling berths.
Silvester said a drop in potash volumes also hampered the port’s overall 2012 growth.
“We saw quite a drop off in potash volume in the second half of the year when Canpotex was negotiating hard over their new contracts into China which they’ve now resolved and agreed,” he said. “I think those two things [Westhore and potash] probably took the total down, I don’t know, maybe a couple of percent.”
Silvester said a key highlight of the port’s 2012 performance was 8% growth in container volumes, which grew to 2.7 million twenty-foot equivalent unit containers.
“That’s an indicator of two things – some good underlying growth in the Canadian economy reflecting in the container imports and a great endorsement of the efficiency of the supply chain that the port and our partners the terminals and the railways are delivering.”
