Port of Rotterdam: How Europe’s Largest Port Competes With Antwerp and Faces Decarbonisation

The Port of Rotterdam is Europe’s largest seaport by a wide margin, yet in 2025 and 2026 it has been growing slower than its ambition because its container quays are full, its chemical customers are closing plants and its energy-transition projects are arriving later than planned. Throughput of 428.4 million tonnes in 2025 was 1.7 per cent below 2024, the third consecutive year of decline, and the first nine months of 2026 brought only a 0.9 per cent recovery. At the same time the Port of Rotterdam Authority, the landlord company owned by the City of Rotterdam and the Dutch state, posted record revenue of €940.4 million and a net result of €266 million, and paid a €186 million dividend to its public shareholders. The gap between a port that is financially robust and a port whose cargo base is shifting under it is the subject of this article. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

What did the Port of Rotterdam handle in 2025 and 2026?

Rotterdam handled 428.4 million tonnes in 2025, 1.7 per cent less than in 2024, with every main segment except crude oil, LNG and agribulk declining, and then recovered modestly to 323.2 million tonnes in the first nine months of 2026, up 0.9 per cent year on year. The 2025 full-year figures, published on 26 February 2026, showed dry bulk down 6.5 per cent, liquid bulk down 1.5 per cent and container tonnage down 0.2 per cent, even as container units rose 3.1 per cent to 14.2 million TEU.

The detail matters because it shows which parts of the Dutch and European economy are moving through the port. Iron ore and scrap fell 11.5 per cent in 2025 as European steelmakers, including Tata Steel in IJmuiden and the German mills that use Rotterdam as their ore gateway, ran at reduced capacity. Coal fell 8.7 per cent to 17.3 million tonnes because coking coal demand from steel was weak, although thermal coal in transit to German power stations rose in the first half of 2025 when low wind output and high electricity demand pushed up burn. Mineral oil products dropped 12.6 per cent, while crude oil rose 3.4 per cent to 101.2 million tonnes as refining margins improved and the Rotterdam refineries of Shell, BP and ExxonMobil ran harder. LNG jumped 15.1 per cent to 13.0 million tonnes as Europe refilled gas storage without Russian pipeline supply. Other liquid bulk, which includes chemicals, fell 3.1 per cent to 34.3 million tonnes, the clearest signal of stress in the chemical cluster.

The 2026 picture has been shaped by geopolitics. The Port Authority’s nine-month release of 16 October 2026 reported that the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz cut oil-product imports from the Middle East, so European refineries imported more crude, lifting crude throughput 2.1 per cent and oil-product exports 31.9 per cent while product imports fell 6.9 per cent. Higher gas prices made thermal coal competitive again, and coal throughput rose 15.3 per cent. Agribulk fell 11.4 per cent, partly because low water on the Rhine raised barge costs and restricted the flow of raw materials inland. Containers were flat in TEU, down 2.2 per cent in tonnes, with hinterland volume up 7.2 per cent but transhipment down 20 per cent.

Chief executive Boudewijn Siemons, who has led the Authority since 2023, has framed the period as one of adaptation rather than growth. In the February 2026 release he described 2025 as a challenging year for chemical and logistics firms, with European industry hit by global competition and geopolitical tension, and he argued that a functioning port is essential to Dutch and European strategic relevance. In October 2026 he emphasised that European hinterland flows were growing and that reliable road, rail and waterway links were the basis for security of supply.

How does the Port Authority make money if cargo is falling?

The Port of Rotterdam Authority is a landlord and infrastructure company, so its revenue depends on long-term land leases and port dues rather than on handling cargo itself, which is why it reported record revenue of €940.4 million in 2025, up 6.6 per cent, in a year when throughput fell. Lease contracts are indexed to inflation, and the Authority raised port dues 7.9 per cent in 2025 through indexation and a new tariff structure that charges more for larger and more polluting vessels.

EBITDA rose 3.6 per cent to €583.6 million. The net result slipped by €7.8 million to €266.0 million because depreciation increased as new assets came into service and because the Authority booked a €13 million one-off impairment. Investment spending of €291.4 million was about 9 per cent lower than in 2024, partly because of a change in how automation costs are accounted for, and partly because the heaviest spending on the Porthos carbon-storage project fell in 2025 rather than 2026. In the first half of 2026 revenue rose 3.2 per cent to €477.0 million, EBITDA 1.3 per cent to €298.8 million and net result 0.9 per cent to €144.8 million, while investments fell 7 per cent to €126.0 million.

The dividend tells the political story. Under new shareholder agreements signed with the City of Rotterdam and the Dutch state, the Authority paid out €186.2 million for 2025, 70 per cent of net result. For a municipality that owns roughly 70 per cent of the shares and a national government that owns the rest, the port is one of the most reliable sources of non-tax income in the country. That stability is also why the Authority can borrow cheaply to fund infrastructure that private operators would not build on their own, from the Maasvlakte 2 land reclamation completed in 2013 to the hydrogen pipeline network now in final preparation.

The structure resembles that of TenneT, the state-owned grid operator: a regulated public asset whose earnings are steady, whose investment programme is enormous and whose constraints are political rather than financial. Both companies are now dealing with the same bottleneck, electricity grid congestion, which the Port Authority named in 2026 as one of the main obstacles to private investment in the port alongside nitrogen permits.

Why is container transhipment leaving Rotterdam?

Transhipment, the practice of unloading containers from a large Asia-Europe vessel and reloading them onto smaller feeder ships for Scandinavia, the Baltic, Britain or Iberia, fell 15.9 per cent in 2025 and a further 20 per cent in the first nine months of 2026 because Rotterdam’s deep-sea terminals lack the quay and yard capacity to handle it alongside growing import volumes. The Port Authority has said explicitly that this volume was diverted to other ports because of quay congestion.

The cause is a capacity trap of the port’s own making. The two automated terminals on Maasvlakte 2, APM Terminals Maasvlakte II and Rotterdam World Gateway, which is owned by a consortium led by DP World, were designed when volumes were expected to grow steadily. Instead, the 2024 reshuffle of shipping alliances, in which Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd launched the Gemini Cooperation and MSC began operating largely alone, concentrated ultra-large vessels at fewer terminals and created peaks that automated yards handle poorly. Larger ships, more containers per call and weather disruptions in early 2025 made congestion worse. A strike by lashing workers at ILS and Matrans in October 2025 added to the backlog, with about 25 vessels waiting off the coast before a court sent the workers back and a deal worth 17 to 20 per cent over three years ended the dispute.

Relief is scheduled. The Authority said in its H1 2026 report that extra capacity would be available at several container terminals from the end of 2026, which it expects to allow container growth to resume. The expansions include extensions of both Maasvlakte 2 terminals on the Prinses Amaliahaven, where the Authority itself built about 2 kilometres of new quay wall, and further automation at Hutchison Ports ECT’s Delta and Euromax terminals. ECT pioneered automated guided vehicles and unmanned stacking cranes in the 1990s, and the Maasvlakte 2 terminals opened in 2015 as among the most automated in the world; the lesson of 2024 to 2026 is that automation delivers productivity in steady state but little flexibility in a shock.

The competitive consequence is that Rotterdam’s share of the Hamburg-Le Havre range has slipped even as its absolute volumes held. Hamburg’s container volume rose 8.4 per cent in the first nine months of 2025 and Bremerhaven grew by double digits, according to port economist Theo Notteboom’s analysis for PortEconomics, while Rotterdam and Antwerp-Bruges were both constrained by congestion.

How does the rivalry with Antwerp-Bruges work?

Antwerp-Bruges, formed in 2022 by merging the ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge, is Rotterdam’s only serious European rival, and in 2025 it handled 266.5 million tonnes, down 4.1 per cent, and 13.63 million TEU, up 0.7 per cent, which leaves it well behind Rotterdam in tonnage but close in containers. The two ports share a hinterland, the Rhine basin and the Benelux consumer market, and they compete for the same shipping-line alliances, the same chemical investors and the same automotive and project cargo.

The structural differences explain the numbers. Antwerp is a river port 80 kilometres up the Scheldt, which gives it a location closer to Belgian, French and German industrial customers but imposes tidal windows and a long pilotage run; Rotterdam is a coastal port whose Maasvlakte terminals can take the largest vessels afloat without tidal restriction. Antwerp is Europe’s largest integrated chemical cluster, with BASF, Ineos, TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil, so its liquid bulk and container exports are more chemical-heavy; Rotterdam is bigger in crude, LNG, coal and ore. In 2025 Antwerp-Bruges’ liquid bulk fell 12.9 per cent and dry bulk 12.1 per cent, worse than Rotterdam, while its container tonnage grew 0.4 per cent. About 25 days of industrial action in Belgium cost the port an estimated 2.4 million tonnes.

Both ports are chasing the same capacity. Antwerp-Bruges is pushing the Extra Container Capacity Antwerp project, a new tidal dock, as its answer to congestion, while Rotterdam is extending the Amaliahaven terminals. Both also compete on the quality of hinterland links: Rotterdam has the Betuweroute freight railway to Germany and the Rhine, Antwerp has the Albert Canal and a denser Belgian rail network. In the first quarter of 2026 Antwerp-Bruges’ throughput fell 3.2 per cent to 65.5 million tonnes while Rotterdam’s fell 0.7 per cent to 103.0 million tonnes, which suggests that Rotterdam’s energy-heavy mix was a cushion during the Middle East crisis.

The rivalry is also a cooperation. The two authorities have coordinated on cyber-security, on hydrogen import corridors and, most visibly, on fighting the drug trade, because smugglers treat the two ports as one system and shift cargo between them whenever enforcement tightens in one.

Why does cocaine smuggling shape the port’s security strategy?

Rotterdam and Antwerp are the two main European entry points for South American cocaine, and the criminal economy around the container terminals has forced both ports, their customs services and the Dutch and Belgian governments into a security build-up that now shapes terminal design, hiring and legislation. Dutch customs seize tens of tonnes of cocaine a year in Rotterdam, with the record years of 2021 and 2022 above 50 tonnes, and Belgian customs in Antwerp have seized more than 100 tonnes in a single year.

The smuggling model relies on “uithalers”, young men paid to enter terminals and retrieve drugs hidden in legitimate containers before customs can inspect them. A law in force since January 2022 made unauthorised entry to a port terminal a specific criminal offence in the Netherlands, punishable by up to a year in prison, and arrests of runners in Rotterdam have since fallen steeply. The side effect, documented by Statistics Netherlands (CBS) in April 2026, is that networks have shifted both to Antwerp, where a record number of Dutch teenagers were detained in 2025, and to younger recruits: one in five people arrested for retrieving drugs from containers in 2023 was a minor. Police and prosecutors have warned that tougher sentencing for adults has pushed recruitment towards under-18s who face lighter penalties.

For the terminals and the Authority the response is physical and digital. Terminals have invested in fencing, camera analytics, biometric access and stricter screening of staff, since corruption of insiders with access to container codes is the most common vulnerability. The Port Authority’s 2025 report listed cyber-attacks, sabotage, espionage and smuggling as linked security threats, described cooperation with other seaports on digital resilience, and announced that drone monitoring and a U-Space airspace plan would start in 2026, in part to detect drones used by smugglers to scout terminals. The Authority also reserved a 15-hectare site on the Maasvlakte for defence logistics, a reminder that NATO’s reinforcement plans for Europe run through Rotterdam.

Where is the energy-transition money going?

The Port Authority’s energy-transition strategy rests on three pieces of infrastructure that it is building or co-financing: the Porthos carbon capture and storage system, a 32-kilometre hydrogen pipeline network across the port, and expanded import terminals for LNG, ammonia and hydrogen carriers, with the first two scheduled to be operational by the end of 2026. Porthos, a joint venture of the Authority, Gasunie and EBN, will pipe CO2 from refineries and chemical plants to depleted gas fields under the North Sea; Boskalis completed the dredging and rock installation for its offshore section in 2025.

The timetable is slipping. Shell’s Holland Hydrogen I electrolyser on the Maasvlakte, 200 megawatts and once billed as Europe’s largest, is now expected at the end of 2026 rather than 2025. Air Liquide’s 200-megawatt green hydrogen plant is scheduled for the end of 2027. The Authority has invested in the pipeline network, a fourth LNG tank at the Gate terminal owned by Vopak and Gasunie, which was commissioned in October 2026, and a temporary transformer in Europoort to ease grid congestion. The Authority has stated publicly that the port’s target of a 55 per cent CO2 reduction by 2030 is becoming unlikely, and it has called on The Hague and Brussels for a level playing field on energy costs, nitrogen rules and grid tariffs.

The investment picture is told in the 2025 numbers: €291.4 million of capital spending by the Authority, down 9 per cent, with Porthos the single biggest item, and a first-half 2026 figure of €126.0 million. These are large for a landlord company but small next to the private capital the port needs, and private capital has been retreating. BP abandoned a biofuels plant in the port in September 2025, two chemical plants shut in March 2025 citing costs, and the refinery and chemical cluster that generates most of the port’s liquid bulk is under the same pressure that drove Shell to move its headquarters out of the Netherlands. The detailed story of the port’s hydrogen plans is covered in the Rotterdam hydrogen hub article in this hub’s energy pillar.

What do the numbers look like side by side?

The table below sets out the Authority’s own figures for 2024, 2025 and the first half of 2026, plus the Antwerp-Bruges comparison for 2025.

The comparison shows the asymmetry: Rotterdam’s energy mix cushioned it in 2025 and 2026, while Antwerp-Bruges’ chemical and bulk exposure made its decline sharper, but on containers, the segment that matters most for employment and for the ports’ long-term relevance, the two are within 5 per cent of each other and both are capacity-constrained.

What happened to Rotterdam’s industrial cluster?

The port’s industrial base, five refineries, dozens of chemical plants and the power stations on the Maasvlakte, has been contracting since 2023, and that contraction, more than shipping-line decisions, explains why throughput has fallen for three years. Chemical production in the port is exposed to European gas and electricity prices that remain well above those in the United States and the Gulf, to carbon costs under the EU emissions trading system, and to new Chinese capacity that has turned the Netherlands from an exporter to an importer of several base chemicals.

The closures have been concrete. In March 2025 two chemical plants in the port shut, citing costs. In September 2025 BP dropped plans for a biofuels plant at its Rotterdam refinery. Methanol throughput fell as European producers lost ground, pulling down other liquid bulk by 3.1 per cent. The Authority has lobbied for an industrial policy answer, and Siemons has repeatedly argued that the port’s relevance is strategic as well as commercial, a line that landed more easily in The Hague after the Hormuz closure of 2026 showed how dependent Europe remains on seaborne energy.

The counter-trend is that some flows are growing because of the same geopolitics. Aluminium imports rose in 2025 as metal diverted from the United States by tariffs was sold in Europe. Offshore wind foundations and steel for the North Sea build-out, described in the Dutch offshore wind story, pushed other breakbulk up 4.6 per cent. Defence logistics and LNG are expanding. The port that emerges from this decade will be smaller in fossil throughput and larger in electricity, hydrogen, CO2 and military cargo, which is a different business with different margins.

How do Rotterdam’s governance and strategy compare internationally?

Rotterdam’s landlord model, in which a publicly owned authority builds infrastructure and private operators run terminals, has been copied from Singapore to Australia, but Rotterdam is unusual in combining a corporatised, dividend-paying authority with a strategy document, Port Vision 2050, that commits the port to decarbonisation targets its owners have not fully funded. The 2004 corporatisation converted a municipal department into a company, gave the state a stake, and allowed the Authority to borrow for Maasvlakte 2, a €3 billion reclamation that added 2,000 hectares and was completed on time in 2013.

Compared with Hamburg, which is still a city department and has struggled for decades to dredge the Elbe, or with Antwerp, which is a company owned by the city of Antwerp and the city of Bruges, Rotterdam has had more autonomy and more money. Compared with Singapore, which is building the fully automated Tuas mega-port, it has moved more slowly on consolidation. Compared with the Port of Melbourne or the Australian ports that were privatised to pension funds, it has kept public ownership and used it to pursue public goals, as readers of the Australia Company Stories hub will recognise from the debate over port privatisation there.

The question for the next decade is whether the model can absorb a shrinking fossil base while funding a transition. The Authority’s 70 per cent payout ratio under the new shareholder agreement leaves less retained capital for investment than in the Maasvlakte 2 era, and the Dutch state’s own budget pressures, from defence spending to the housing shortage, compete for the same money. Rotterdam’s 2050 vision assumes that private investors will follow public infrastructure; the record of 2023 to 2026 shows that they have been hesitant to.

What can founders and investors learn from the Port of Rotterdam?

The Port of Rotterdam demonstrates that infrastructure monopolies with indexed revenue are resilient to volume shocks but not immune to structural shifts in their customer base, and that the capacity decisions of a decade ago determine competitive position today. Four lessons stand out for founders, chief financial officers and investors.

First, landlord economics beat operator economics in a downturn. The Authority grew revenue 6.6 per cent and paid a record dividend in a year when its tenants were cutting output, because its contracts index to inflation and its port dues scale with vessel size. Any business that can structure its revenue as indexed, long-term rent on a scarce asset will show the same profile. The weakness is that the landlord then depends on tenants’ long-term health, which is why the Authority has become an industrial-policy lobbyist.

Second, automation is a productivity tool, not a flexibility tool. The Maasvlakte 2 terminals were the most advanced in the world in 2015 and are the most congested in 2025 because they cannot easily absorb volume peaks caused by alliance changes and larger vessels. Founders building automated operations should budget for slack capacity, because the gain from automation is lost if the system has no buffer.

Third, security and compliance are a competitive moat that no single player can build. The cocaine problem has forced Rotterdam, Antwerp, customs and governments into joint action because unilateral tightening simply moves the problem. Investors in logistics should price the compliance burden explicitly rather than treating it as overhead.

Fourth, energy transition timelines slip, and plans should be stress-tested for a two-year delay. Porthos, Holland Hydrogen I and Air Liquide’s plant were each announced with earlier dates than they will achieve, and the Authority has conceded that its 2030 target is at risk. A chief financial officer modelling a hydrogen or CCS investment in Rotterdam should assume the enabling infrastructure arrives later than the press release says, and should check how Vopak has sequenced its own terminal investments, since the tank-storage company has deliberately kept its energy-transition capital behind its gas and industrial spending. For the dredgers who build the port’s quays and polders, see the Boskalis and Van Oord story.

Frequently Asked Questions