Wpływ inwestycji i modernizacji portów morskich w Gdańsku i Gdyni na zmiany struktury przeładunków portowych.

Today's ports, as hubs linking maritime and land transport, must compete effectively on the market. Ports, especially those important to their economies, are evolving into value-adding organisms, key hubs in global supply chains in which infrastructure and superstructure are elements of a unified logistics system focusing on high efficiency and accessibility for ever-larger vessels, as well as the minimisation of congestion risks. Against that background, the work described here has sought to present current processes of investment and modernisation at the Polish seaports of Gdańsk and Gdynia, as well as the possible influence of these measures in modifying the structure of port cargo-handling over the 2009-2019 period. The study uses data on volumes of cargo handled at the ports, with analysed size-related and structural changes in the cargo stream both pointing to new connections within the directional structure, and therefore new regions (continents or countries) to which cargo is being sent from the two ports. More specifically, at the Port of Gdansk, the years 2018 and 2019 brought clear structural and volume-related changes in transshipments as compared with those made in 2009. In relation to 2009, there was a decrease in the share of turnover accounted for by liquid fuels, even as the share of general cargo transshipments increased, while the shares taken by coal and coke transshipments hardly changed, even as there was a doubling of cargo weight. Although this data analysis offers no basis to point to a widening of the foreland, it is possible to demonstrate marked increases in transshipments to ports in Africa, Australia and Oceania, as well as Asia (Table 3). Already existing transshipment relationships were augmented by container transshipment to Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia (Table 4), while the transshipment volumes to most European countries also increased, with the exception being Germany. In the latter case, transshipments both from and to the country were down. Overall at the Port of Gdansk there was a 65% increase in the volume of cargo in the 2015-2019 period (Table 1) Similar changes were found to characterize the Port of Gdynia. In both 2018 and 2019, the structure of transshipments there differed from the 2009 situation (Table 5). The period in question saw a marked increase in transshipments in all directions except Africa (Table 6), while container transport from and to the port of Gdynia featured new emerging directions, including Denmark, Estonia, France, Lithuania and Sweden (Table 7). While the shares of the directional structure of container transshipments accounted for by Germany and The Netherlands declined Gdynia in the period 2015-2019 resembled Gdańsk in experiencing one of the largest increases in transshipments of any of the Baltic ports, at almost 56% (Table 1). Analysis of changes in reloading at the ports, as well as volumes, structure and directions, serves to confirm the impact of new port developments and modernisation, with all the limitations related to factors affecting the volume of reloading work in ports. Furthermore, the development of port infrastructure and suprastructure (e.g. warehouses) in both Gdańsk and Gdynia can be considered to have exerted a major additional influence. In essence, investment intended to develop capacity in reloading, as well as to achieve further diversification, did allowed each port to achieve those objectives, with an opportunity to expand the foreground of each port also provided and taken advantage of. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]