EDITORIAL 1/2022
THE WINDS OF CHANGE TURN STORMY THE COVID PANDEMIC, which has hit the industry surprisingly hard, is now showing the first signs of abating. Of course, we still have exceptionally many absences due to Covid, which means severe headaches in all ports. As if that weren’t enough, a real storm started blowing from the east. We have all followed the events in Ukraine in horror, and I fully understand that for many, just watching the news is becoming too much to bear. Our difficulties are nothing compared to the suffering of civilians in Ukraine, although of course, the war and the related sanctions also affect our business, and that of our customers in particular. We have not been involved in bulk transit for years, and the container transit through Finland pretty much dried up years ago. Still, the omission of even this small share contributes to the imbalance on the Finnish route. The entire logistics sector has been particularly hard hit by the war in the form of dramatically rising fuel prices. No one could have anticipated such a cost increase and, as a result, fuel surcharges have also had to be levied on port operations, where cost increases have traditionally been quite predictable and thus manageable. On a positive note, perhaps this will finally accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels in ports as well. After all, the technical solutions already
exist for heavy port machines. The rapid transition has simply been hampered by money. The first decent-scale solar power plant has just been commissioned at the Kotka container terminal. It is a pity that we were not the first, but fortunately, the gold medal in this race went to our subcontractor, who now has a solar power plant to generate electricity on the roofs of their warehouses tailored to handle forest industry products. Many consider solar power plants to be little more than just dabbling in the green transition, but this plant alone has a peak capacity of 120 kWp and a planned annual output of 110 MWh. So not quite just dabbling over just 780 square metres. We have a few more hundred thousand square metres of sunny roof space alone! I wish our readers a happy summer!
TAPIO MATTILA Senior Vice President Marketing and Sales Steveco
PHOTO: OLLI URPELA
Publisher: Steveco Oy, Kirkkokatu 1, P.O.Box 44, 48101 Kotka, Finland Tel. +358 5 23231 Editor-in-chief: Tapio Mattila Editorial board: Elina Harjama, Markus Myllylä, Mia Brunila, Eija Suntio, Vesa-Heikki Renlund Printing house: Painokotka Oy Paper: MultiArt Silk Edition: 200 ISSN 1456-212X Cover image: Q Yachts/Altti Heinilä Address change: www.steveco.fi or eija.suntio@steveco.fi
11/2022 /2022
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