This article was published by The Weekly Standard under the title, "How China acquired a major port in Europe".
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| COSCO's first of two 80,000-tonne capacity floating docks, new additions to the Piraeus Port Authority's ship repair division. (Handout photo) |
ATHENS, Greece - In the Salamis strait where an Athenian-led fleet of 380 ships once sank a Persian fleet of more than a thousand and altered the history of the Western world, the China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) is redrawing global trade routes. The strait lies just outside the port of Piraeus and is the heart of its cargo business. Container ships arrive around the clock to be loaded or unloaded with pinpoint precision. The only sound is that of whirring motors as containers are lifted from decks and placed on flatbed trucks to be stacked on the quay.
Since 2008,
when it signed a 35-year lease from the Piraeus Port Authority to operate two
container piers, COSCO has increased throughput from 700,000 twenty
foot-equivalent units (teu) to what it estimates will be over four million this
year. Within the next five years, Piraeus is scheduled to handle 7.2mn teu a
year, making it the Mediterranean’s biggest cargo hub and putting it behind
only Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg in Europe. COSCO has sunk €600mn into
shoring up the strength of the piers to shoulder the weight of container cities
stacked six storeys high, doubling the size of the second pier, and installing 33
of the tallest gantry cranes in the world, capable of loading and unloading
container ships so large, they have not yet been built. By the time COSCO
finishes its investments, Piraeus will be the only Mediterranean port capable
of harbouring five giga-container vessels simultaneously.
