Port of Hamburg Magazin 03 - Hafen Hamburg

125.
For 125 years Hamburger Hafen
und Logistik AG (HHLA) has
actively witnessed and shaped
the development of the Port of
Hamburg. The company was already
involved when by 1914 Hamburg
rose to become the world’s third largest
port after London and New
York. Today HHLA with its cuttingedge
handling terminals and facilities,
an ecologically exemplary transport
network, as well as complementary
logistics services, stands for
trend-setting intermeshing of global
cargo flows between Europe and
overseas, and especially via the
Hamburg hub.
Frank Horch, President of Hamburg
Chamber of Commerce: “HHLA belongs
to the port as the Alster and the
‘Michel’ do to Hamburg. Even in
our merchant city so rich in tradition,
for a company to achieve a 125th
anniversary is no everyday occurrence.
I congratulate the Executive
Board and the staff on this special
birthday and link that with a confidence
that HHLA will also remain
the motor powering our port“.
Klaus-Dieter Peters, HHLA Chairman of
the Executive Board: Hamburg has
always particularly thrived when it
could exploit its citizens’ competence,
its economic power and the
city’s favourable location for the
international exchange of goods.
Naturally this was not a job only for
commerce or one company. It was
always a joint effort linking together
the commitment of its citizens, politicians
and companies.”
HHLA has in past decades experienced
and survived many a storm, and its
success is based on a host of intelligent
policy decisions. It was deliberately
launched by its founding fathers in
1885 as a public company with private
shareholders, with the state providing
areas and infrastructure against a
share of the profits. Efficient private
enterprise and long-term thinking in
the direction of a strategy for the
whole port were to be interwoven in
this way. With the stock exchange
launch on 2 November 2007 and
admittance soon afterwards to the
MDAX, the second-ranking German
share index, we have now come full
circle. “As at the founding of the
company, its private commercial
The Great Jubilee Special
components were stressed, and private
capital mobilized, not just for
the company, but also for expansion
of the port,” said Peters.
On 7 March 1885 HHLA’s forerunner
“Hamburger Freihafen-Lagerhaus-
Gesellschaft” (HFLG) was founded
to build the biggest and most modern
logistics centre in the world in the
new Freeport. Within a few decades,
the world’s largest and most modern
warehouse complex was built there.
As the great warehouse site in the
Freeport, that was an ideal foil for
the new quay facilities in the port,
Speicherstadt made a decisive contribution
to Hamburg’s success as a
world port. Today HHLA is sensitively
handling the transformation of the
Speicherstadt, under historic building
protection, to an attractive down -
town quarter between the office
district and HafenCity.
The modern Port of Hamburg port is a
universal port where goods of virtually
all types can be handled, transported
and stored: Bulk goods, such as wheat
or ore, but above all general cargoes
of all kinds, well over 90 percent are
now delivered in containers. HHLA
handles around 60 per cent of total
port throughput. This mainly consists
of containers, but also of project
and heavy cargoes, tropical
fruits like bananas, newsprint, cars
for export, and coal and ore. HHLA
also operates facilities for storage
and contract logistics.
One of the Port of Hamburg’s great
strengths is its excellent links with
the European hinterland that HHLA
will be systematically expanding in
the coming years. Hamburg has
always beamed as a rail port. 70 per
cent of all goods on long-haul routes
are transported by rail. HHLA intermodal
companies play a very substantial
role.
Foto: HHLA
As a vertically positioned logistics
group with a regional focus on the
logistics hub Hamburg plus its hinterland,
today HHLA is well equipped
for the future in core areas of
the European logistics sector.
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