Zeeland Seaports aims to expand the infrastructure provided for processing steel over the next few months to take advantage of rising European imports of steel products, an official at the Dutch port authority has said.
The Dutch government-owned company, which operates the ports of Vlissingen and Terneuzen, already has five steel service centers that it leases to private companies. The centers take in steel from plants for processing to end-users' specifications. The port authority is now preparing to add five more service centers as Europe imports greater volumes of basic grades of steel from Turkey, CIS and Asia, leading to a shift of these centers to ports from inland sites.
"We have got a lot of space available, so we are investing in infrastructure for new service centers that will be lent out to commercial operators," said Zeeland Seaports commercial manager Marcel Pater in a phone interview by Reuters. "Generally service centers are near steel mills, but as the market share of imports through deepsea ports is growing, there is more need of service centers where the products are treated, processed, strengthened. We see a growing market for that. The port will be like a supermarket for metals."
Some of the existing centers are owned directly by steelmakers such as Finland's Outokumpu, while others are operated by independent companies. The port authority has been approached by a number of companies interested in operating service centers on site. The centers will decoil, galvanize and process steel. "The reason for them to come here is that steel trade is more and more concentrated around ports rather than inland," Pater said.
Zeeland Seaports, the third-largest port company in the Netherlands, registered a nearly 40 percent increase in metal products handled in 2010 from the previous year and another rise of 20 percent year on year to 1.24 million mt in the first nine months of 2011.