The year 2020 has not been a good year for the Port of Barcelona. The infrastructure has registered profits of 17 million euros, 63% less than a year ago. The bill left by covid is 34 million euros, adding the fall in income and the resources allocated to facilitate the liquidity of port companies. Despite all this, the Port of Barcelona indicates that recovery in traffic has already begun to be noticed, initiated at the end of 2020 and maintained in the first months of 2021.
Overcoming this shock will depend on the pace of vaccination and the resumption of activity, but the Port of Barcelona wants to continue acting as an engine of economic recovery through investment. "Investment cannot slacken," defended the president of the Port of Barcelona, Mercè Conesa, at the presentation of the 2020 results. The Barcelona infrastructure has budgeted an investment of 50 million euros for this 2021, a figure similar to that of 2019, before the stop due to covid.
This year's investments will include the start of works on the rail and road accesses, an issue that has accumulated years of delays and began to unblock in October 2020, when the Port of Barcelona, the Generalitat and the Government signed a protocol to make them possible. The new accesses must serve to increase the rail capacity of the infrastructure, which in 2020 achieved 15% of container rail traffic, with almost 265,000 containers entering or leaving the port area by train, the most positive figures left by 2020 according to the general director of the Port, José Alberto Carbonell. Rail traffic means an annual saving of 51,000 tons of CO₂ and taking 131,000 trucks off the road.
With this growth in rail container traffic, which places the Port of Barcelona at European standards, Conesa has warned that they already require more rail capacity and that, if issues such as access or the expansion of the sidings on the Barcelona-Zaragoza line are not urgently accelerated, the infrastructure may begin to experience tension. In this regard, the president of the Port celebrated that this week the monitoring commission for access will be constituted, an "important step" to continue advancing in its concretization.
The infrastructure doubles its investment for this year, going from 27 million executed in 2020 to 50 million in 2021The investments planned for 2021will also affect the expansion of the Adossat Dock and the remodeling of the fishing area,with a new fish market. Another project that will start this year will be the expansion of the logistics activities zone (ZAL), afterthe Port's board of directors has commissioned a study to analyze possible land for expansion. Conesa has not specified where they will be located and has only indicated that it should preferably be near the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB), although she has not ruled out that it could be in the second ring. Nor has she defined how this expansion will be carried out, whether with own resources or through investee companies, as has been done on other occasions.
Regarding the investments made last year, Conesa stressed that no work had to be postponed, although the investment finally executed was 27 million euros, while the forecast was around 70 million. Conesa justified this by the administrative barriers that ports face in the bidding process for works. Among the works carried out in 2020, emergency works due to storm Glòria and the reinforcement of the mooring system of the cruise terminal stand out.
Resumption of cruise activity
The fall in income and bonuses to companies have placed the Port's turnover at 139 million euros, at the level it obtained in 2006. The total traffic of the infrastructure has decreased by 11.9%, to 59.5 million tons. The different traffics have had very unequal behaviors during 2020, but passenger traffic has been the most affected, with a total drop of 81.5%. Ferry traffic fell by 55.8% and cruise traffic by 93.7%, losing 11 million in fees.
Conesa has demanded the urgency of having "clear protocols" that allow the resumption of cruise activity, highlighting the importance of this sector for the city, with some 9,000 workers and an annual income of 560 million euros. "We would like to start working with reasonable calendars, which would be in the summer months," the president explained.
The Port of Barcelona has not wanted to advance forecasts on the results they can achieve this 2021 and has stressed that they only expect them to be better than those of 2020, taking into account that the recovery seems to have already begun. Conesa has detailed that they estimate it will take three years to recover the level they had in 2019, before the crisis, although she has remarked that this period could be shortened depending on the pace of traffic recovery.
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