The Role of Port of Piraeus in the One Belt One Road Initiative - Investment Proposals and Strategic Planning.

The One Belt One Road initiative (OBOR) is the project that professionals expect to change the rules and the balance of international trade. It consists of one set of commercial land routes and a set of ports-nodes which compose a maritime trade corridor starting from China and leading to Europe. The project’s cost is about to reach US$ 1 trillion while it will generate profits of about 2.5 times above its cost. More than 60 countries are part of the OBOR project counting more that 60% of the world population. Port of Piraeus is the largest Greek port and in the same time it constitutes a great transhipment port in the Mediterranean Sea. The port’s annual TEU volumes exceed the threshold of 4 million TEUs, a fact which ranks the port as the 7th greater in Europe. According to the OBOR officials, port of Piraeus constitutes the gateway for the Chinese products carried by sea to the European markets. The purpose of this study is to propose the adoption of an alternative port model based on the cargo throughput, and potential ways for strategic planning in order to reach to this outcome. Through gathering data about the current container volumes of the port, the local cargo and the cargo that is transferred to Europe by rail, some forecasts are conducted in order to predict the future conditions of the port until 2025. In addition, a simulation on the quay side operation is made, in order to check the efficiency of the port and its ability to support greater volumes of cargo due to its new role in the OBOR initiative. Furthermore, as port logistics is a subject of great value for the development of ports, they play a key role in the majority of the most efficient and busy ports. As a result, this study focuses in analysing the different strategies in port logistics and supports the concept of a dry port implementation close to the Greek borders. The results of this paper aim to contribute to the port of Piraeus management team’s work, in the future strategic planning of the port, by providing significant information about the future cargo volumes/flows, as well as, the efficiency of its infrastructure