BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 7. APM Terminals, the company operating Georgia’s Poti Port, recorded a significant rise in cargo flow in and out of the Poti Port over the first quarter of 2022, Iain Rawlinson, Chief Commercial Officer at APM Terminals Poti, told Trend.
“The tragic events unfolding in Ukraine right now have left the Caucasus region with big challenges in terms of the ability to get the cargo in and out. We have seen quite a significant increase, at least in the short term, over the last couple of months. How stable this is going to be is hard to say, because there is a big overall uncertainty in the region at the moment,” he said.
According to Rawlinson over the past two years, APM Terminals saw a substantial decline in volumes - over 20 percent each year. “At the same time, we discovered new opportunities to diversify. We moved our focus to rail ferry and general cargo operations, and we were able to at least cover most of the financial shortages,” he noted.
As the chief commercial officer explained, as a result of a combination of a change in trade patterns in 2022, container volumes started returning into the Black Sea and Georgia in particular.
“What we are seeing is an enormous interest on the part of both neighbors in the Caucasus, and also across the Caspian, in Central Asia. They are interested in promoting the Middle Corridor rail connection both for cargo originating out of China, which over the last few years has moved through Russia, but more recently we see it coming through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian, through Azerbaijan, and then to Georgia’s Poti, to be delivered by sea into Europe. The reason for this is that Northern Corridor across Russia is simply impossible to operate through right now,” Rawlinson said.
Today the company has a capacity of roughly 500-550,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) per annum, which is an increase, compared to the last year when the operator handled just over 300,000 TEUs - around 60 percent of total capacity. The company is working closely with regional partners in order to improve the connectivity and cargo flow further.
APM Terminals is a port operating company headquartered in the Netherlands and is a unit of the Transport and Logistics division of the Danish Maersk shipping company.
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