The Sea in Focus - Germany's Sea Trade as an Element of a Globalised Economy

摘要

A most 90 per cent of world trade is conducted by sea. The Covid 19 pandemic has not changed this, even though the volume of world trade shrank by as much as a third due to the interruption of supply chains. In addition to the trade in consumer goods, the international energy trade is also mainly carried out by sea and around a third of freight volume is accounted for by crude oil alone. If crude oil is the blood of the world economy, then shipping is its circulatory system. With 1,061 ships on the basis of the nationality of their owners, Germany had numerically the largest container fleet on 1 January 2020. Its 2,715 merchant ships represented the fifth largest fleet in the world on the same basis in 2019. Globally, the world's merchant fleet has over 55,000 seagoing vessels whilst world container throughput increased by 1.9 per cent over the course of 2019 to reach a total of 694 million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs). Fifteen million of these passed through German ports, with Hamburg in the lead. With some 9.3 million containers handled, the ancient Hanseatic city ranked 17th in the world. The maritime sectors of shipping, seaports (with their hinterland connections), shipbuilding and the associated supply industry are of outstanding importance to Germany. Of these, shipping is the core industry in the German maritime cluster, generating a turnover of around €50Bn each year and employing up to 400,000 people. Passenger shipping is also growing strongly also, even though Covid-19 deeply cut volume. There are currently around 6,500 passenger ships worldwide. Of these about 450 are cruise ships, owned by an industry dominated by a little over 50 shipping companies.