The Best terminal of the Port of Barcelona celebrates ten years as a European benchmark

The company Hutchison Ports has celebrated the tenth anniversary of the launch of the BEST macro-terminal for containers located in the Port of Barcelona, which has become a benchmark for the Hong Kong group in Europe due to its technological systems and advances in sustainability. It is Hutchison Ports' first semi-automatic terminal, occupying one and a half kilometers of the El Prat dock and nearly 80 hectares, andis booming with an investment of 60 million eurosthat will allow it to gain another ten hectares and move annually 3.5 million TEUs ---TEU is the unit equivalent to a 20-foot container---. Works that began last May and will be completed, in a first phase, by the end of 2023. From the port infrastructure, nowadays,Hutchison Ports BEST can serve multiple large vessels simultaneously and is the largest on-dock rail terminal in the Mediterranean, which is connected to Southern Europe. The company wants to continue with this strategy in the next ten years to increase activity while improving the sustainability of operations, according to the general director of the European division of Hutchison Ports BEST, Clemence Cheng, during the tenth anniversary celebration event. The head of the group also mentioned the need to finalize the railway connection for access to the Port of Barcelona. Railway transport is one of the priority strategic axes. For this reason, BEST believes that the new accesses, together with its actions through its subsidiary Synergy to increase railway services that connect with thehinterlandof the terminal in Barcelona, will allow exceeding the 250,000 TEUs registered last year.

Hutchison's terminal is responsible for 78% of the Port of Barcelona's rail freight traffic

Rail is "a cornerstone of our business plan" for the coming years, acknowledged the CEO of Hutchison Ports BEST, Guillermo Belcastro, who also referred tothe electrification of its docksas another of the great challenges to improve the sustainability of activities. In this sense, for Belcastro, the words of the Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, Raquel Sánchez, who presided over the event, were welcomed when referring to the project to build new road and rail accesses to the southern area of the Port of Barcelona.The minister assured that progress is being made ceaselessly on this 600 million euro investment,and which foresees that before the end of the year the basic planning of these new infrastructures will be finished. The construction of the new southern accesses which, in the words of the minister, are essential to reach the maximum potential of the Port of Barcelona, will contribute to doubling the share of goods entering and leaving the infrastructure by train, which currently stands at 15%. Not in vain, the objective is to strengthen the railway hub that is to be developed in the Catalan port. For his part, the president of the Port of Barcelona, Damià Calvet, has described BEST asEurope's "most efficient" terminal thanks to its "continuous commitment to innovation". In Calvet's words, Hutchison's terminal is responsible for 78% of the Port's rail freight traffic and 70% of the infrastructure's "record figures."