How did Finnish sea transport volumes look like in 2022?

In 2022, Finland’s foreign trade by sea was 95 million tons. The amount varies every year, but in practice, for the last 20 years, foreign trade by sea has remained at the same level.

Figure 1. Finland’s foreign trade by sea (source: Statistics Finland, Statfin).

About 10 percent of this foreign trade was on trucks, 7.5 percent on trailers, 12 percent containers and 71 percent solid and liquid bulk cargo. Imports of consumer goods and exports of industrial products usually travel in units such as containers, trucks or trailers. Of these, containers are usually coming from outside Europe, for example from China, trailers go directly to Germany or Poland, and trucks to either Sweden or Estonia. Raw materials such as oil, grains, ores, fertilizers, etc. travel in bulk or tanker ships and usually travel on the same ship for their entire journey, i.e. all over the world.

Figure 2. Transport modes of Finnish maritime transport in 2022 (source: Statistics Finland 2022)

The share of unit cargo, measured in tons, is about a quarter – on the other hand, much more valuable cargo is transported in unit cargo, so the share of unit cargo, measured in value, is much larger. In practice, trucks only travel from Helsinki, Hanko, Naantali, Turku and Vaasa. Some of these routes run passenger car ferries and some ro-ro ships without passengers.

Figure 3. Trucks between Finland and foreign countries by port pairs (source: Traficom). Volumes under 2000 units are left out of the figure.

The recovery of Estonian traffic from the pandemic

In our unit traffic, the largest single traffic is the traffic between Helsinki and Tallinn, which has grown almost without stopping for the last thirty years. Even during the pandemic, freight traffic continued to grow. The traffic is fast and has a high frequency, which helps truck companies to get an efficient circulation of their fleet and thus a lot of income. Traffic on the line is divided into “twin city” traffic between Helsinki and Tallinn, traffic between Finland and Estonia, and transit, where trucks travel between Finland and Central Europe.

Figure 4. Passenger traffic between Helsinki and Tallinn (source: Traficom)

Figure 5. Truck traffic between Helsinki and Tallinn (source: Traficom)

Figure 6. Passenger car traffic between Helsinki and Tallinn (source: Traficom)