COSCO Shipping Ports and Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA) has penned a final agreement for the acquisition of part of a Hamburg port-based container terminal.
The agreement provides the Hong Kong-listed subsidiary of China’s state-owned conglomerate China COSCO Shipping Corp with an interest of 24.99% in one of three HHLA’s container terminals at Germany’s largest port.
The terminal will now be developed into a preferred handling location for HHLA’s long-term customer COSCO, where freight flows between Asia and Europe are to be concentrated.
“The collaboration between the partners thus strengthens the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg’s position as a logistics hub in the North Sea and Baltic region as well as Germany’s position as an industrial nation,” HHLA said in a statement.
COSCO Shipping Ports got the green light to buy into the Tollerort terminal in October 2022. The final details of the deal were not completed by January this year, but HHLA claimed that the transaction was going to be completed soon.
The transaction hit a snag in April when the German Federal Office for Information Security classified the Tollerort terminal as critical infrastructure and the country’s government decided to reassess the deal.
Initially, COSCO planned to take a 35% stake in the terminal, but after several ministries expressed concerns about critical infrastructure falling into foreign hands the deal fell through. A compromise was made for COSCO to buy a 24.99% stake as the Chinese company would not gain any exclusive rights to the terminal or access to strategic know-how.
That means that, regardless of COSCO owning a piece of the Tollerort terminal, it still won’t have any access or decision-making rights at the terminal.
