The Busiest Ports in Mexico

As Mexico becomes an increasingly important player in global trade, there is one key source of concern for logistics operators: the potential for Mexican port saturation. This, in great part, comes from the rise of Mexico as a global destination for manufacturing, as nearshoring pushes Western countries towards friendlier nations. In this context, Mexico has emerged as a major supply chain destination, even surpassing China as the largest trade partner to the U.S.?

But, with this increased attention, one could reasonably ask if there is reason to believe that the country’s ports could handle the growth in activity? Mexico is now in the middle of an upwards trajectory that could bring dozens of factories and millions of dollars in investment. Yet, is it ready to handle the heat?

At Auba, we wanted to help answer the question by doing what we do best: leveraging data to find key insights that operators can act upon. So we looked at historical data from the four largest ports in Mexico: Manzanillo, Lázaro Cárdenas, Veracruz, and Altamira.

We used a comprehensive data set form the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which encompasses all trade volumes for the majority of ports around the world since 2019, including Lázaro Cárdenas, Manzanillo, Veracruz, and Altamira.

As an initial metric of port activity, we calculated the average trade activity handled in a port on any given day across the five year period considered by the IMF. Namely, after adding the values for imports and exports, we found the average trade handled at each port in Mexico. Thereafter, we identified if days fell above or below that average to get an idea of how busy Mexico’s ports tend to be.?

As most logistics operators can tell, shocks to logistics are often correlated with larger cyclical trends. Some ports are likely favored by retailers, making them susceptible to shocks around holiday seasons as producers gear up for increased sales. Others might be preferred by manufacturing companies that could import goods earlier in the year to meet the demand of suppliers ahead of the holidays. So, although the four largest ports in Mexico exhibit similar rates of activity, these might vary on a monthly basis.

In order to better understand these trends, we looked at the average traffic handled each month at the ports examined over the last five years. This creates a snapshot of their average activity month to month as shown in the figure below.

As the graph shows, there are actually many key differences in port activity. Manzanillo, for once,? sees a growth in cargo activity between April and July, while Lázaro Cpardenas exhibits a number of bumps leading to a rise in cargo in August and a decrease towards the end of the year. Veracruz, meanwhile, has two distinct peaks in operations in April and October, while Altamira concentrates activities in the first half of the year.

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