The building materials that represent over 60% of the traffic in Ile de France were hit hard (-13.1%) by the slowdown in economic activity recorded at the end of 2008.
However, buoyant container traffic and increased diversification with the launch of containerised paper transport through the Port of Gennevilliers by the company UPM and containerised cereal exports from the Port of Limay by cereals cooperative UCAYC demonstrate that the waterways remain a transport mode of the future in the Seine basin.
The agrifood sector (+3.6%), boosted by a good cereals campaign, and fuel (+8.6%) also showed growth.

The Autonomous Port of Paris is…

• One of the world's busiest inland tourist ports.
• A useful port: 20 million tonnes of traffic via the waterways each year, taking one million trucks off the roads of Paris and its region.

Prospects 2009

While 2008 and 2009 have obviously been affected by the general economic situation, our intention is to build on our assets to hold strong in the crisis, while also preparing for the return to growth.
For example, the Autonomous Port of Paris has worked hard throughout the year to foster growth in traffic in the medium term, with the new contracts signed in 2008 by companies setting up (or extending) activities in the port network set to generate as much as an additional 3.8 million tonnes.
The ambitious and methodical development of the container network to respond to the potential identified in the Le Havre Port 2000 and Seine-Northern Europe Canal projects will increase our incoming/outgoing capacity for waterway container transport to 340,000 units in 2012. This is much more than traffic forecasts for that date, and in fact represents three-quarters of maximum traffic estimates for 2020, adding in the objectives of the Le Havre Port 2000 development and those of Voies Navigables de France for the opening of the wide-gauge Seine-Northern Europe Canal in 2015. It represents considerable growth from the figure of 100,000 twenty-footer equivalents currently handled in Ile de France. In this way, the Autonomous Port of Paris remains true to its ambitions, and also to its duties as a public institution, by acting now to anticipate the needs of tomorrow and therefore satisfy them all the more effectively.

Three principles have guided all our efforts throughout the course of the year:

• building a denser port network,
• boosting development policy,
• asserting the exemplary environmental qualities of our facilities.

It is through these principles that we uphold the importance of the Seine to Ile de France and its contribution to the dynamics of the French capital and its region.