Future Cities
2022 Global Seaport Review: Piraeus, Greece
Navigating evolving global seaport regions and their impact on industrial real estate
December 13, 2022 4 Minute Read
The Port of Piraeus has achieved impressive container volume growth over the past decade, increasing from 2 million TEUs to nearly 6 million TEUs amid a quantum increase in both the number of ships and the average shipment size.
Overview
The Port of Piraeus, Greece’s biggest port, is the 24th-largest container port globally, the fourth-largest in Europe and the largest in the eastern Mediterranean. The port is in Attica in southern Greece and is centrally positioned for traffic passing through the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean and Black seas. The port is south of the 38th parallel, which allows it to attract Asian shipping without requiring significant deviation from established trade routes.
The port ranks 27th on the United Nations Port Liner Shipping Connectivity Index, making it the best-connected port in the eastern Mediterranean. It offers transshipment feeder services to ports throughout the Balkans and the Black Sea. The Piraeus Port Authority (PPA) is majority owned by COSCO Shipping, a Chinese state-owned company.
Figure 1: TEU volumes
Source: CBRE Research, Port of Piraeus, 2022.
Figure 2: Population demographics
Source: macrotrends.net (Athens, Greece), 2022.
Recently upgraded port in the eastern Mediterranean facilitating Asian-European trade
Port features
The port’s piers have a total length of 1,150 meters and a maximum depth of 18 meters (59 feet), with a combined capacity of approximately 7.2 million TEUs. The piers can accommodate post-Panamax ships carrying up to 16,000 TEUs. The port features a 72,400-sq.-m. container storage area and seven ship-to-shore cranes, four of which are large enough to handle post-Panamax vessels.
Piraeus' rolling program for infrastructure investment and equipment upgrades has quintupled its handling capacity since 2008. Its potential capacity will exceed 10 million TEUs within the first half of the 2020s.
Figure 3: Port details
Source: CBRE Research, Port of Piraeus, 2022.
Trade partners
The port’s largest trading partner is China, with Greece now China’s fourth-largest trading partner among Central and Eastern European countries. China is the third-largest trading partner of Greece and its biggest trading partner outside the EU. Other major trading partners include Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Cyprus.
Intermodal transportation
A rail line links the port with the primary logistics area near Athens on the Thriasio plain and logistics assets near newly constructed railway facilities.
The port specializes in global container traffic, regional transshipment and onward freight traffic via road and rail. It dispatches 10 trains daily able to reach Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany within four or five days. A planned second route, the Orien/East-Med Corridor, will connect to other Greek ports and European industrial and distribution hubs along a route through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany.
Real estate influence
Strategic investments are being made to connect the port with three logistics areas on more suitable land beyond the city.
The Thriasio Pedio plain is home to Thriasio I, a new 240,000-sq.m. logistics development to be situated on 0.6 square kilometers of land, with construction commencing in 2023 once final parliamentary approval is granted. Thriasio II is a further concession of 1.45 square kilometers of land from the Greek state for the construction of a new logistics facility. The concession for Thriasio II has not been finalized but the process is nearing completion.
The other two hubs are located outside Oinofyta in suburban Athens, which is connected to the port by motorway and rail line, and is close to Athens International Airport. The suburban hub is mainly occupied by wholesale and retail occupiers.
Government and EU-level plans to turn Greece into a regional and global logistics hub are centered on Piraeus as a key point of entry, which will drive further expansion of the port’s logistics market.
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