Tanger Med seeks to expand facilities, limit congestion

Tanger med port handled some 51 million tonnes of cargo. The Moroccan port offer on the Mediterranean will be enriched in 2021 with a second logistics platform, called Nador West Med.

This new port will have a capacity of 3 million TEUs, expandable to 5 million. The infrastructure will also handle 25 million tonnes of hydrocarbons, 7 million tonnes of coal and 3 million tonnes of general cargo annually.

It will also serve to complete the offer of the port of Tangier Med, whose terminals are currently running at full capacity. Indeed, in front of their local and regional competitors, the authorities of Tanger Med do not stop setting the bar even higher. In the first quarter of 2018, the Moroccan port posted positive results for most of its activities, “despite the exceptionally bad weather,” says the port management.

Container traffic increased by 3% to 788,774 TEU handled at both the TC1 and TC2 terminals. Growth is certainly timid, but partly due to the saturation of the Tanger Med I wharves, while the entry into service of Tanger Med II, the extension project, is not planned until 2019.

Ro-ro traffic shows a better growth rate, of 12%, and some 90,000 trucks handled during the first quarter. This performance is explained by the fact that the truck remains the preferred means of transport for Moroccan exporters and its use is benefiting from the development of new export sectors, particularly in the automotive industry.

For the passenger activity, the eight berths on 35 hectares had a 12% decrease in traffic compared to the first quarter of 2017, for a total of 373,343 passengers.

Behind this poor performance are the poor weather conditions marked by strong winds and heavy rains, which slowed the rate of maritime connections between the two shores of the Mediterranean. In contrast to passenger traffic, vehicle traffic grew by 24%, one of the largest rises in the first quarter.

In all, 110,756 vehicles were handled during this period at the two port terminals. In addition, there were 90,179 units handled at the Renault terminal, of which 71,823 came from the Renault plant in Tangiers and intended for export. The transhipment of vehicles handled in the Common User Vehicle terminal reached 19,905 units.