Lübeck:
Logistics the focus for growth

	Lübeck double-storey ramps cope with ever-bigger ships.

“Lübeck is Germany’s biggest ro-ro port – and it will stay that way”, said Manfred Evers, head of the Lübecker Hafen Gesellschaft (LHG) and he and other port officials believe the key to achieving that is the further expansion of the big Baltic port’s already considerable logistics competence and clout.

Success these days, Evers told SSG, depended not just on handling and volumes but also on expanding logistics performance. The LHG and its associates, he said, had long-since realised that and had already transformed themselves into a formidable logistics group. Much had been achieved but much more was yet to come, he indicated.
Already shaping terminal ro-ro movement is the integrated port logistics system IHS. “We developed this ourselves”, said Evers “and it covers all the functions of a modern logistics port – from paper products handling and warehouse management to ro-ro and container handling and to new vehicle handling and gate control”.
Lübeck is Germany’s largest ferry and ro-ro port and northern Europe’s biggest port of entry and distribution for the Swedish and Finnish paper products industry. Its customers include the leading players in the sector, among them Finnlines, TT-Line, Transfennica, Nordö, Stena and Scandlines.

Greatly increased capacities
All have upgraded their fleets dramatically in recent years and brought in some of the most advanced tonnage afloat, with greatly increased capacities. Lübeck has moved to meet not only the IT but also the equipment demands on its handling facilities. A good example of the latter are double-storey ramps – three on the Skandinavienkai and one at the Nordlandkai.
By 2015, according to a Berlin Transport Ministry study, Lübeck could be handling 40 million tons. Some 95 per cent of that will be ro-ro traffic “we are also just as capable of handling bulk and heavy cargo”, Evers said, not missing a trick.
However, negative all-round economic development last year led to a disappointing decline in handling in 2001, just as Lübeck was getting its teeth into dramatic growth. After a record 25.6 million tons in 2000, handling at the port’s municipal and private facilities slid 4.6 per cent to 24.4 million tons.
Despite that, Lübeck remains Germany’s biggest ro-ro centre with a 40 per cent market share and it appears to have no fears about losing its lead. Manfred Evers, in fact, expects a fast recovery from the 2001 handling dip.
“The cooling of the economic climate in Germany, Sweden and Finland impacted on Lübeck and the other Baltic seaports”, he said. “But we expect the situation to stabilise in the first half of this year and hope to see an upward trend emerging again in the second half of 2002.”

Volkswagen moved exports
The number of accompanied and unaccompanied trucks and trailers using Lübeck dropped by three per cent from about 650,000 in 2000 to 630,000 in 2001 while sea container handling declined 13 per cent from 64,000 to 56,000 containers. Also, only about half the new cars handled in 2000 were coped with in 2001 – 84,000 rather than 162,000, after Volkswagen moved its Finland car exports to Cuxhaven on the North Sea.
Down too in 2001, by about six per cent, was paper and cellulose handling at LHG terminals. In 2000 those terminals handled 3.5 million tons of forest products – 12 per cent more than in 1999 and an all-time record. Handling fell back in 2001 to just over 3.3 million tons. Despite that, Lübeck continues to solidly build on its role as the biggest port by far for the north European forest product industry.
That has now been bolstered by the diversion to the port last year of an annual packet of 250,000 tons of UPM-Kymmene forest products which previously moved through Baltic rival port Kiel. “That business will stay in Lübeck”, a spokesman told SSG. A further boost has come with the inauguration of a Fast Dispatch forest products warehouse complex, unique in Europe, at the Nordlandkai Terminal.
The facility boasts nearly 40,000 square meters of space and is designed to cope with not only current but also growing future logistical demands in the sector. Some 1,500 m of covered quayside are available for the weather-protected transshipment of trucks and rail wagons.
Truck and trailer traffic to and from Finland has meanwhile been relocated from the Nordlandkai to the Skandinavienkai in Travemünde. That has saved traffic not only a trip along the Trave River but has also further honed the competitiveness of fast trailer services, since the Skandinavienkai has a direct motorway connection. Operations there are also now backed by a new slot monitoring and gate system, speeding up the handling process.

Excellent position
Lübeck is the most southwesterly of all Baltic seaports and as such is in an excellent competitive position with good hinterland links.
Officials maintain it offers the shortest and most cost-favourable land links between Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltics on the one hand and the industrial centres of central, west and southern Europe on the other.
It also has connections via the A1 motorway, via goods handling rail stations in all terminals and via the Elbe-Lübeck Canal for all three transport modes. Backing that are 120 scheduled time-table ferry departures a week to 19 ports in the Baltic region, most of them paired so that freight capacities, ferries and hinterland transport movers are constantly utilised. Inland, 35 block train departures a week are scheduled to European industrial centres.
“Lübeck”, Manfred Evers told SSG, “offers its customers logistical services which go well beyond normal seaport handling. They get forwarding, distribution and goods commissioning and our services go right through to advice for customers from our own consultancy subsidiary.” The port also points with pride to its ISO 14001 environmental and ISO 9002 quality management certification. It is, it notes proudly, the only German port to boast both.
//Tom Todd

Competition the spur to survival

“We are on the right track. In future however we must work more closely together if we are to survive the competition”.

The comment, at a reception for city and port economic front-runners, came from Lübeck Economics Senator Wolfgang Halbedel late last year. It was a reference to the ever-increasing rivalry which Lübeck faces from other Baltic ports, particularly those further east in the former GDR. Assigned to backwater status by many in the wake of German unification in 1990, facilities like Rostock, Wismar and Stralsund have, in fact, bounced back and, after more than four decades of economic isolation, woken up to the advantages and potential of their closeness to Scandinavia and the eastern Baltic. That awareness has been honed by newly-opened borders and by the revival of previously close east German ties with eastern economies.
All these developments have been further nurtured by priority, job motivated German Government investment in seaport channel deepening and port infrastructure modernisation, and in the rebuilding, now gathering pace, of once moribund hinterland rail and road networks.
Lübeck is still well ahead of its nearest rival, Rostock, and breathing easier again in that respect after last year’s handling dips. That’s because Rostock, too, saw its handling decline in 2001 to 20.5 million tons after a record 22 million in 2000 brought it dangerously close to Lübeck totals.
The danger is, however, far from over, as Halbedel indicates.
Main customer TT-Line operates ro-ro freight services between Trelleborg and both Travemünde and Rostock. It saw freight unit totals rise two per cent in 2001 to 261,000 units.
However TT head Hanns-Heinrich Conzen reported that while Travemünde services had suffered from a generally weak market and that volumes there had dropped by four per cent to 173,000 trucks and trailers, Rostock units had risen 19 per cent to 88,000.
A main reason for that was the increasing significance of east German locations for industry customers, Conzen was quoted as saying. He was quoted as adding that “when the A20 (coastal motorway) is completed, Rostock will be a new alternative to Travemünde” and that because of that he expected above-average growth in Rostock.

“Most important”
A spokeswoman for Finnlines was quoted last autumn as saying Lübeck “would in the short and medium-term remain the most important port on the Baltic”. She added however that competition was being distorted by “one-sided promotional measures” in eastern rival ports, presumably a reference to unilateral official support for development there. Another operator was quoted as saying that Lübeck was more expensive than Rostock.
Asked however if Rostock could one day take the lead in German Baltic ro-ro, LHG head Manfred Evers told SSG “Rostock, like Lübeck, will continue to chalk up gains. But we believe that our logistic know-how and investment, tailored to specific development, will enable us to further expand our leading market position as the Baltic’s centre of competence.”
//Tom Todd

Hinterland key to future development

Over the last six years the LHG and the city of Lübeck have invested more than 300 million DEM to adapt port facilities to the increasing demands of customers. That shows no sign of easing off with a further EUR 350 million now earmarked for further development up to 2010.

	Skandinavienkai, earmarked for more expansion.

The overall priority goal is to position the city as a centre of competence for logistic services, said Lübeck Mayor Bernd Saxe. It was essential, he said, to market the location and promote co-operation between logistics providers and the local economy to turn Lübeck into a logistics and transport centre with the port at its hub.
“We are already in the process of expanded the port itself to meet future demands”, says Manfred Evers. It will, he said, build on the solid logistics and consultancy advantages it already has and on its role as a leading forest products logistics facility.
One main aim stressed by both Saxe and Evers will be to improve the performance of the port’s already good hinterland road, rail and waterway transport links and to reduce the role of trucking in that sector. The idea is to get as much cargo as possible onto more environmentally friendly modes and to optimise modal split operation.
Currently 80 per cent of all Lübeck transports take place by road, 16 per cent by rail and four per cent by inland waterway. By 2010 the port wants to see rail’s share rise to 30 per cent and that of inland waterways to 15 per cent while road’s share drops to 55 per cent.

Quick improvements
Customers and port officials alike are uninamous in the belief that hinterland improvements have to come quickly if Lübeck is to hold its number one lead on the Baltic. Long overdue key improvements, many say, are the further development of the Elbe-Lübeck Canal, the electrification of the railway network in the direction of Hamburg, the building of an Elbe crossing east of Hamburg to relieve the A1 motorway, and a bypass for Hamburg.
One development being praised is Lübeck’s link with the new A20 coastal motorway along the east German Baltic to Poland. Another is the development of a major EUR 15.3 million rail terminal for combined transport. Officials are optimistic construction of that, at Skandinavienkai, will begin in spring and be completed in summer 2003.
LHG’s Jörg Ulrich has big hopes for the terminal. He points to a 60 per cent increase in combined rail/road transport to and from Sweden and a 40 per cent increase in Finland traffic – much of it the result of summer weekend truck restrictions, planned tolls on trucks in Germany and rising road congestion.
The new terminal will handle 100,000 units a year. Ulrich expects 65,000 soon after opening and 80,000 for the whole of 2003. The facility will be run by the new Baltic Rail Gate GmbH, a joint venture of LHG and Kombiverkehr in Mainz.
As well as the new rail terminal, the Skandinavienkai itself is in for some far-reaching changes over the coming years. The current 47 hectare site will also be expanded by a further 30 hectares of operational area. At the same time, two industrial estates, together covering about 35 hectares, are being created for port-related services giving new and old customers the chance to settle close to handling quays and offer logistic services.
It is hoped that part of that development will be a new office and terminal complex, costing between EUR 17 and EUR 25 million, to house shipping companies, forwarders and port concerns, among them LHG.
It is also hoped to expand the Schlutup Terminal by ten hectares while the already existing Nordlandkai Fast Dispatch Centre can be expanded at any time as needed and 18 hectares of space at the new Seelandkai Terminal in Lübeck Siems are to be turned into a new multi-functional handling facility.

First of its kind
Lo-lo handling will also, inevitably, play a part in future Lübeck development with the completion this year of the Lübeck Container Terminal (LCT) the first of its kind on the German Baltic.
It is not a Lübeck project, but rather a joint venture involving Hamburg’s biggest operator HHLA and Combisped Hanseatische Spedition and it is designed to speed up the flow of nearly a million Hamburg transit containers a year between the North Sea and the Baltic by using fast shuttle trains.
Officials in both Hamburg and Lübeck however believe prospects for future co-operation are possible. The terminal will, of course, also and by its very presence, increase Lübeck’s hinterland qualifications. HHLA spokesman Olaf Mager told SSG it would be “decisively significant for the development of attractive, efficient and expandable logistics chains in the Baltic region” and “to the advantage of both seaports”.
Combisped managing director Ulrich Gross said some EUR 30 million were being invested in the facility, which will cover 80,000 square m and boast 320 m of quay for feeder ships on 9.5 m of water. It is hoped that the LCT will eventually be capable of handling as many as 800,000 TEU a year.
//Tom Todd

Back to SSG 3, March 8