The Port Authority of Strasbourg (PAS) and HAROPA, in the presence of Ms Catherine Trautmann, Chairman of PAS, Mr Jean-Louis Jérôme, Executive Director of PAS and Mr Hervé Martel, Vice-President of HAROPA and Executive Director of HAROPA-Port of Le Havre, have signed a partnership agreement here aimed at enhancing their cooperation.
The cooperation is based on 4 facets:
MULTIMODALITY
The PAS and HAROPA want to make a scheduled and high-performance rail service emerge, connecting their business areas in Day A – Day B. This service is a business issue enabling Strasbourg to diversify the seaports served from its area and thus facilitate cargo export by Rhine companies. To cope with the growing congestion of the ports in the ARA zone generated by mega containerships, an alternative solution via HAROPA will allow for gaining competitiveness in terms of transit times and transport costs.
For HAROPA, the cooperation between seaports and inland ports is emerging. HAROPA is already both the French largest container seaport and the French leading inland port. HAROPA serves a vast hinterland, the centre of which is situated in the Seine valley and the Paris region forming France’s largest consumer market. This new cooperation makes it possible to extend its European hinterland towards the east via Strasbourg.
PORT COOPERATION
The partners have the common ambition to improve the performance of the trans-European transport network, especially concerning the following corridors: Atlantic, North Sea-Mediterranean, Rhine-Alps and Rhine-Danube. Inter-port cooperation also aims at sharing good practices and experiences as regards port alliances.
Strasbourg, like HAROPA, indeed knew to ally with geographic partners. Created in 2012, the HAROPA EIG (Economic Interest Group) groups together the ports of Le Havre, Rouen and Paris and bears joint economic interests with the objective to form a European-sized port system in the field of industry, logistics and tourism at the service of their customers in an extremely competitive North Europe-an field.
Since 2012, the port of Strasbourg has allied with 8 other ports in the Upper Rhine in Switzerland, Germany and France: Ludwigshafen, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Kehl, Colmar/Neuf-Brisach, Basle, Mulhouse et Weil-am-Rhein, within the framework of the common project “Upper Rhine, a connected corridor”, an exemplary cooperation recommended by the transport policy of the European Commission.
INNOVATION
Innovation and digitalisation are strongly at stake in logistics and transport. The partners shall give very special attention to the interchange of good practices in terms of traffic management, smart cities/smart ports. The PAS will especially bring support to HAROPA in its approach of the industrial ecology. The CLES approach carried out in Strasbourg is so far one of the most successfully completed in France.
PROMOTION
Finally, the PAS and HAROPA wish to communicate with one voice in Europe and abroad in order to have the strategic rank of France in the port economy (both sea and river) heard and known.
This cooperation will be mainly ex-pressed by organising common business events and thematic workshops in France and abroad.
The agreement gives shape to the common will of both partners to build innovative and pertinent solutions contributing to the development of new trades and services to strengthen the attractiveness of the port sites of PAS and HAROPA.
Seahorse Ship Agencies represents HAROPA in India.
