The Port of Barcelona maintains its good commercial streak and grows in exports and imports.

BarcelonaWhile we wait to see how global trade chains react to Donald Trump's tariffs, international trade continues to grow at home. This is confirmed by the Port of Barcelona, with growth in both container exports and imports in the first seven months of the year. This is the main indicator of the positive mood of all the companies working in the infrastructure, as well as their local clients. A trend that also confirms The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Enterprise, whose Catalonia is recording its best foreign trade balance of the year.

Full container traffic for export to other markets grew 6% between January and July, reaching more than 423,600 TEUs (a unit of measurement for containers equivalent to 20 feet). Likewise, imported containers increased 11.4%, with a cumulative traffic of nearly 424,900 TEUs. In July, in the midst of tariff negotiations, the port recorded its highest import figure of this year. China, the Port of Barcelona's main market, with 28% of total container traffic, has yet to reach an agreement with Trump. China, the Port of Barcelona's main market, accounts for 28% of total container traffic. It continued to grow in July, with a 13.5% increase, as did India and South Korea. In contrast, container traffic with the United States has moderated, with a modest increase of 0.9%.

With a Europe that has committed to buy more energy from the United States to avoid a trade war, one of the traffics that has increased the most at the port is hydrocarbons, with gasoline increasing by 60.3% compared to last year and natural gas, by 59%. Precisely, 45% of the liquefied natural gas that reaches the Catalan infrastructure comes from the US market, a proportion that has been increasing recently.

Despite the positive data of these indicators, the Port of Barcelona is still affected due to the reconfiguration of global traffic by the world's leading shipping companies. Companies such as MSC, Maersk, and Hapag-Lloyd have signed new trade agreements to better respond to increasingly frequent disruptions with new port calls, coinciding with the paralysis caused by the Gaza war in the Suez Canal, the main gateway to the Mediterranean for ships from Asia.

A year ago, the port saw container traffic grow by 18.5% due to the blockade of Suez and the establishment of an alternative route that passed through Gibraltar and stopped at nearby ports. In recent months, with the new international route scheme, Catalan infrastructure has seen a collapse in transshipment containers, a slowdown that is now beginning to moderate. With double-digit declines so far this year, in July it registered a drop of 20.8%, less pronounced than the 45.7% drop of the previous month.

The Port expects a full recovery in the coming months and a strong year-end. For now, container traffic, which includes imports, exports, and transshipment, has decreased by 6% in the first seven months of 2025 compared to the previous year, to 2.2 million TEUs. This has also caused total traffic to fall by 2.4%, to almost 41 million tons.

Cars, in crisis

The crisis in the automotive sector is also being felt at the Port of Barcelona, where electric cars are struggling to take off and the arrival of much cheaper Asian brands. The Catalan capital is the exit point for cars manufactured in plants such as Seat's Martorell and Volkswagen's Pamplona, which have seen production declines, but it is also the entry point for 81% of Chinese vehicles. they arrive In Spain.

Against this backdrop, vehicle traffic has fallen by 3.8% through July, with around 424,600 units moved, further evidence of the uncertainty facing the industry. The Port has two terminals dedicated to vehicle transport, Autoterminal and Setram, to which a third will be added in 2027, recently awarded to the Japanese group NYK. With these three terminals, the infrastructure will have approximately 120 hectares dedicated exclusively to this type of traffic.