13 January 2017
Calais, 13 January 2017
The Port Boulogne Calais published today its results for 2016. A globally difficult year, in particular with regards to cross-channel traffic, but with a progressing fourth quarter bringing hope for 2017.
A particularly difficult year for passenger traffic
As a direct consequence of the incidents linked to the important migrant population in the Calais area, car traffic suffered and important drop compared to 2015 with reduction of its volume by 6,96%.
This trend can also be noticed on passenger traffic, dropping by 6,8% at 9,090,694 passengers as well as coaches down by 8,3% with only 80,448 vehicles. As it stands the Port Boulogne Calais has fallen short in 2016 of 112,052 cars, 695,559 passengers and 7,269 coaches compared to 2015.
A market share loss on cross channel freight
Lorries travelling to and from Great Britain through Calais have also suffered from the strong presence of migrants around the port until October.
The Port Boulogne Calais lost some market share as it only managed to grow its freight traffic by 3,38% with 1,909,011 travelling through the port while the market grew overall in 2016 by 6%.
A healthy performance of commercial terminals
While we suffered from important losses over the past years, the activity of the commercial terminals both in Boulogne and Calais showed promising results in 2016. Stimulated by the important needs of the Calais Port 2015 construction site, the commercial activity closed the year with a total volume of 1,224,978 tons handled while Boulogne showed a total volume of 616,367 tons.
Boulogne maintains its position as France’s n°1 fishing port in volume and n°2 in value
Despite a drop of 6,2% of its volume, the port of Boulogne remained France’s number 1 fishing port in 2016 with 33,628 tons of fish. A volume loss that was partially counterbalanced by increase of average price per kilo of 5% thanks to two great months in November and December and which allowed the port to maintain its rank as France’s second biggest fishing port in value with revenues of 77,8 million euros.
Jean-Marc Puissesseau, CEO of the Port Boulogne Calais declared: « 2016 was a deceiving year despite the good performance of the fishing activity in Boulogne and the outstanding results of our commercial terminals.
The dismantling of the migrant camp in Calais allows us to be more hopeful for 2017 but we must recognise that the situation around the port prevented our services from operating under normal conditions for most of 2016.
I remain confident in our capacity to innovate and get back on our feet. The upcoming restart of the Le Boulou-Calais rail motorway by VIIA as well as the important efforts made by our team to improve the overall quality of our services gives us reasons to be hopeful in our capacity to regain our market share in 2017.
Press contacts
Isabelle FAUQUET
Tel : +33 7 85 54 04 47
isabelle.fauquet@portboulognecalais.fr
Xavier DECRAMER
Tel : +33 6 04 67 36 46
