CL Port of San Antonio

A new report shows that the Chilean port of San Antonio experienced the largest increase in container traffic in Latin America last year, beating Buenos Aires, Kingston and Lázaro Cárdenas.

The BNamericas Infra, Water & Waste Stats Report revealed that throughput at San Antonio rose by 15.1 per cent to 1.23m TEUs. Traffic at the port of Valparaíso, meanwhile, fell by 3.4 per cent to 940,000 TEUs. The Chilean government is planning to build a third, large-scale port between San Antonio and Valparaíso which would triple the region’s capacity by 2020.

Elsewhere, the report showed a fall in consolidated traffic at Panama’s key port hub of 4.3 per cent to 6.86m TEUs. However, traffic is forecast to rise once the US$5.25bn Panama Canal expansion project is completed in December 2015. Container traffic at the Colombian port of Cartagena also fell, this time by 7.8 per cent to 1.87m TEUs.

Traffic at Santos, the biggest port in Brazil, registered an increase of 8.7 per cent to 3.45m TEUs, while the Mexican port of Manzanillo also experience a rise in throughput of 7.2 per cent to 2.14m TEUs. The Brazilian government has a US$24bn programme in place into expand port capacity, while Mexico is pumping US$4.7bn into its port expansion scheme over the next five years.