Director's Corner - March

By Tine Kirk Pedersen, Director, Danish Ports

March has arrived and spring has come to Denmark. In these times, the flowers are peeping out and we see fresh shoots on the trees. But it is also at this time that the annual accounts for 2018 from the country's ports are ticking in, and it looks quite reasonable. In recent weeks, we have seen good annual reports from Aarhus, Hirtshals and Thyborøn, just to name a few. Others are sure to follow suit, and all in all, the industry is doing excellently, which we at Danish Ports are of course pleased with.

We are also pleased that in the past month we have been involved in launching political wishes for the industry, launching the plans for a new and strengthened cluster collaboration with our blue partners and, not least, contributing to good stories about how much our ports and the rest of Blue Denmark contribute to creating growth and prosperity for the Danes.

Common ground for a strengthened maritime cluster

In collaboration with Danish Shipping, Danish Maritime, Maritime Development Center (MDC), Maritime Center for Optimization and Operations (MARCOD) and Funen Maritime Cluster, we launched last month the plans for a new cluster organization that brings together the maritime cluster activities across Denmark with a focus on, among other things, analysis and data about Blue Denmark, joint branding of Blue Denmark, education and recruitment, maritime business development, entrepreneurship and more.

It is a new and expanded collaboration that we at Danish Ports are incredibly happy about, and I think it is fair to say that we have an exemplary collaboration in our industry.

Now, of course, in the new collaboration, we need to get a handle on everything from membership structure, establishment of an association with founding partners and a board of directors, and we need to establish a secretariat with representation in Copenhagen, Funen and Jutland, and from there we will work together to ensure that Blue Denmark is nominated and designated as one of the 10-12 national positions of strength.

Denmark needs a blue neighborhood check

Since the last newsletter, we have also been in the press with a concrete policy proposal for the Danish politicians who will soon be engaged in intensive campaigning ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections.

This is a political wish that we put forward jointly with Danske Maritime, and in short, we want an international neighborhood check of the port area and the Danish maritime equipment industry, so that we can see if we can avoid over-implementation and national special rules.

If Danish maritime companies and ports are to be a global powerhouse in the future, regulation and over-implementation of legislation must be mitigated. Otherwise, we will lose the global competition.

And when the final results of the neighborhood checks are available, it is crucial that the relevant ministers are involved in the work of putting action behind the words to make Denmark a global maritime powerhouse. Danish Ports and Maritime Denmark are already very willing to be part of this work.

Read the full post on Altinget here:

Blue Denmark accounts for 25% of Denmark's exports

Since then, we have also been able to welcome a new report from the Danish Maritime Authority, which concludes that the Blue Denmark as a whole creates employment for 96,000 people and accounts for 6.5 percent of Danish GDP.

The report also shows that employees in Blue Denmark create more than twice as much value to the Danish economy as the average employee.

The Blue Denmark directly employs around 60,000 people and almost 96,000 people when indirect employment is included. This corresponds to 2.1 and 3.4 percent of the employed in Denmark, respectively.

The report can be read in more detail here:

In a nutshell: Blue Denmark exports almost DKK 232 billion and thus accounts for 25 percent of Danish exports, and this is of course a very uplifting pat on the back for the entire industry. What we are doing really means something.