China’s Participation in European Container Ports: Drivers and Possible Future Scenarios

There is currently a lot of attention on Chinese participations in European ports, particularly on how to interpret and explain their growth. This article aims to identify main drivers and, based on this analysis, to provide three scenarios of possible Chinese involvement in European ports. It will focus on the two Chinese state-owned companies active in European container ports: COSCO and China Merchants Group (CMG). These state-owned enterprises act under the supervision and, to some degree, the direction of the Communist Party of China, via the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC), their majority owner. Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have stakes in 16 terminals in 13 different European ports, which represented, in 2019, a cargo volume of around 11 million standard containers (defined as TEUs: twenty-foot equivalent units, Figure 1). Around three quarters of these participations belongs to COSCO, a quarter to CMG, their sha