Plan for Tiel Container Terminal Moves Forward (The Netherlands)

The province of Gelderland is granting a €460,000 subsidy for the construction of a container terminal on the Medel industrial estate in Tiel. In the future, up to 80,000 containers a year will have to be handled at the new terminal.

A sizeable proportion of these will contain temperature-controlled cargo. The terminal is one of the sub-projects of Fresh Corridor. A few weeks ago, the municipality of Tiel received €900,000 from the state for an access road to the terminal.

Global interest

The regional project group Logistics Hotspot has been approached by a Russian hypermarket chain. The company, with turnover of €2.5 billion, apparently wants to establish a meeting point there for luxury Western products, which can be transported from Medel to various destinations in Russia. A large American trading company (with turnover of $8 billion) that deals primarily in fruit and vegetables from Central and South America, is allegedly also interested in Medel as a base for Europe. The project group is also assisting a company already established on the Medel estate in attracting a large Asiatic firm that deals in white and brown goods.

The aim of the regional planners is to turn the area around Medel into an international transport hub, or hotspot, with two container terminals and lots of associated commercial activity. There is a tendency in logistics towards more cooperation between large companies and the concentration of accompanying operations, such as packaging or repacking, processing or assembly. Transport by truck, ship or rail is supposedly a lot more efficient this way. In addition to big Dutch companies already in the region, such as the retailers Albert Heijn and Blokker or manufacturer Heinz, the project group is targeting the major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

[mappress]

Source: portofrotterdam, October 8, 2012