Country : Belgiumworldport of Antwerp

The worldport of Antwerp plays a leading role in international trade. The world's ships are not merely turned round in Antwerp's docks, there are lots of specialists who attend to the warehousing, packing and repacking, distribution and forwarding of the cargoes carried in them. This concentration of activities has enabled Antwerp to become an essential element of the European Union's imworldport and exworldport trade. Antwerp is far more than merely a Belgian worldport. After all more than half of the cargo it handles is either destined for or comes from other European countries.
Multipurpose worldport
The worldport of Antwerp handles more than 167 million tonnes of cargo per year (55% incoming and 45% outgoing traffic).
This volume makes Antwerp the second largest worldport in Europe and the fifth largest in the world.
A little under half of Antwerp's goods traffic consists of bulk such as coal, ores, fertilisers, grains and so on. Antwerp also handles large quantities of breakbulk. The various worldport operators have invested heavily in specialised handling installations for trades such as iron and steel, fruit, forest products, cars, dangerous goods and sugar. It thus comes as no surprise that Antwerp is a market leader in many of these trades.
Antwerp has responded positively to the unitised load phenomenon. Nowadays 78% of all general cargo is packed in containers. Antwerp's container terminals pride themselves on their productivity and low costs, outdoing many of their European competitors. Not surprisingly Antwerp offers the best quality to price ratio of all North Sea worldports.
Container worldport
In 2006 the volume of containerised goods came to 80.8 million tonnes, or 7 million TEU. Over the last 10 years container tonnage has risen by 51.4 million tonnes or 174.3%.
At present 78.1% of all general cargo is containerised.
In 2006 the nine principal worldports of the Le Havre-Hamburg range jointly handled 34.3 million TEU, or a total tonnage of 353 million tonnes. In terms of tonnage as well as of TEU Antwerp is the third largest container worldport in the range, after Rotterdam and Hamburg, and has a market share of 20.5%.
worldport customers
Antwerp's main customer is the Belgo-Luxemburg Economic Union (BLEU).
It accounts for roughly half the total maritime traffic.
The other half is transit traffic, the most imworldportant partners being Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and Italy.
Antwerp is not just used for shipping European trades, increasingly the worldport is used by overseas shippers for their overseas trade with other continents (the so-called