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All Hands on Deck: The Commission’s Playbook for EU Ports
All Hands on Deck: The Commission’s Playbook for EU Ports
14 July 2026
Series
Blogs
14 July 2026
Authors: Christoph Barth, Sinziana Ianc, Odysseas Tzanetis
The Commission plans to deploy its full regulatory arsenal to protect European ports — strategic assets at the heart of the EU’s push for supply-chain resilience and genuine strategic autonomy. That is the central message of the European Ports Strategy, endorsed by EU Transport Ministers at the June 2026 Council. In this post, we unpack what the Ports Strategy means for FDI screening, the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) and merger control — and why the political backdrop behind it matters.
The backstory: why ports became a geopolitical flashpoint
Europe’s sensitivity about port ownership did not emerge from abstract policy theory. Over the past decade and a half, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have assembled stakes in more than 30 European container terminals, from Piraeus to Rotterdam, from Zeebrugge to Valencia. The strategic logic is plain. Ports are the arteries of global trade and controlling them confers both commercial advantage and political leverage.
Piraeus is the starkest example. COSCO, a Chinese SOE, first leased two piers there in 2008, then acquired a 51% stake in the Piraeus Port Authority (PPA) during Greece’s debt crisis in 2016, and steadily increased that to 67% by 2021 — making it the only European core port effectively controlled by a Chinese SOE. President Xi Jinping called Piraeus China’s “dragon’s head” in the Mediterranean. The numbers are striking: PPA’s container throughput soared from around 1.5 million TEU in 2010 to over 6 million TEU today. That transformation was not uncontroversial: security analysts warned of the intelligence-gathering potential of Chinese-operated port infrastructure.
Hamburg was next on the list. In 2021, COSCO agreed to buy a 35% stake in HHLA’s Container Terminal Tollerort in Hamburg. The deal split Germany’s coalition government down the middle. Six federal ministries, the foreign intelligence service, the European Commission, and the United States all raised objections. Then-Economy Minister Robert Habeck argued that critical German infrastructure must not fall under the influence of a company that, as an SOE controlled by China’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, is ultimately an instrument of the Chinese Communist Party. In the end, a political compromise limited COSCO’s stake and governance rights.
Beyond Hamburg, the COSCO-Duisport saga illustrated how scrutiny was widening to cover not just seaport acquisitions but inland logistics infrastructure. In 2019, COSCO Shipping Logistics joined Duisport, Hupac and HTS to build the Duisburg Gateway Terminal — set to become Europe’s largest inland container terminal, handling up to 850,000 TEU annually and running up to 100 China-bound trains per week. That greenfield joint venture attracted intense political debate, with then-Economy Minister Habeck again signalling opposition to Chinese involvement in what he viewed as critical hinterland infrastructure. COSCO ultimately divested its 30% stake, with PSA International stepping in as replacement shareholder. The Duisburg episode was one of the catalysts for calls to bring greenfield joint ventures within the scope of FDI screening — a question that animated the negotiations over the recast EU FDI Screening Regulation.
FDI Review – Port of Scrutiny
The recast EU FDI Regulation, which comes into force on 16 July 2026 and which must be implemented by all 27 Member States by 17 January 2028 (when it starts to apply), brings foreign investments in critical transport infrastructure within its common minimum scope, requiring Member States to screen foreign investments in such infrastructure. The ultimate determination of whether a port is considered critical remains with the Member States. However, the FDI Regulation expressly refers to managing bodies of core ports in the EU’s Trans-European Transport Network and to port service providers as examples of entities to be considered, directly informing Member States’ assessments. On greenfield investments specifically, the final text leaves the decision to include them in national screening mechanisms to individual Member States, a compromise between the European Parliament’s position (which would have mandated screening of certain greenfield projects) and the Council’s position. Given the Duisburg experience, pressure on Member States with major logistics hubs to screen greenfield joint ventures will likely grow.
The Ports Strategy heralds the next step. The Commission will issue specific FDI guidance for Member States on foreign investment screening in EU ports by 2028. The guidance will take a systemic view, focusing not just on individual deals but on the role of port operators in critical supply chains and on strategically sensitive ports falling within the scope of the Military Mobility Regulation. It will set thresholds and criteria for assessing foreign influence, including influence over strategic decisions, operational control and dependence on high-risk equipment suppliers. A framework for mapping and monitoring foreign investments across the EU port network will accompany it. This granular approach directly reflects concerns raised by Germany and others that individual minority stakes, innocuous in isolation, can create strategic dependencies when viewed as part of a connected web across the European port network.
Casting a Wide Net for Foreign Subsidies
The Ports Strategy also puts the FSR and its enforcement tools squarely in the spotlight. It flags the risk that companies backed by foreign states may gain unfair advantages in the EU internal market and identifies “aggressive investment strategies” as a threat to the level playing field. More pointedly, the Ports Strategy signals that bidders from countries which exclude EU port operators, or with which the EU has not concluded agreements ensuring fair and non-discriminatory access, should not expect unrestricted access to EU port-related concessions and procurement opportunities.
Large public port concessions can trigger mandatory notification under the FSR’s public procurement instrument, where (i) the estimated contract value is at least €250m and (ii) the bidder has received at least €4m in foreign financial contributions over the previous three years. Acquisitions of control over port operators can similarly trigger FSR review, where (i) the target’s EU revenue is at least €500m and (ii) the parties have received more than €50m in foreign financial contributions over the preceding three years.
Although the FSR applies in a non-discriminatory way to all companies backed by foreign states, the Ports Strategy makes clear that reciprocity considerations will shape where the Commission trains its enforcement lens.
The FSR’s reach extends beyond individual tenders or M&A deals. The Commission can open ex officio investigations wherever it suspects that foreign subsidies are distorting the internal market — a power the Ports Strategy specifically highlights in connection with a port’s reliance on high-risk equipment suppliers.
The Commission’s first ex officio investigation into Nuctech illustrates how FSR enforcement could interact with the concerns highlighted in the Ports Strategy. Nuctech, a Chinese supplier of scanners and threat detection systems used by many large European ports, was raided by the Commission in April 2024 — another FSR first. In December 2025, the Commission opened an in-depth investigation after finding sufficient indications that Nuctech had received foreign subsidies liable to distort the internal market, including grants, preferential tax measures and preferential financing. The Commission argues that this may have enabled Nuctech to offer lower prices, potentially winning contracts at competitors’ expense. If the Commission ultimately finds that Nuctech has received distortive subsidies, it can impose remedies ranging from changes to commercial conduct to structural measures such as divestments. The Nuctech case will be an important test of how far FSR enforcement can reach into critical supply chains.
Vertical Integration – From Quay to Hinterland?
The Ports Strategy makes no secret of where it stands on shipping-line-to-terminal integration. It acknowledges that “the increasing vertical integration of large logistics and shipping operators is changing the traditional port landscape” and that it can “improve predictability of traffic development and thereby support long-term investment plans, deliver efficiencies and innovation across logistics chains, reduce transaction costs and improve service quality.” Read alongside the Commission’s recent enforcement, this is close to a policy endorsement of the structural trends that are reshaping global container shipping.
The draft revised Merger Guidelines published earlier this year (see our blog post here) are consistent with this direction. They recognise that mergers facilitating “supply chain security, critical infrastructure and defence readiness” may be assessed favourably and introduce a “theory of benefit” framework under which parties can invoke long-term dynamic efficiencies, including security of supply, as factors in their favour. That said, the Guidelines also introduce two new theories of harm of particular relevance to ports: loss of investment and expansion competition (capturing deals that reduce incentives to build capacity), and entrenchment (targeting acquisitions of critical infrastructure that cement structural barriers to entry). Both reflect the Ports Strategy’s parallel ambition to keep the European port landscape competitive and diversified. Investors should not read the pro-integration signals as a free pass.
What investors need to get right
The Ports Strategy sends a clear signal: port transactions will no longer be assessed in silos. FDI screening, FSR and merger control will operate as an integrated surveillance system, with strategic autonomy, supply-chain resilience and competitive market structure as the organising objectives. For investors, that means three things.
First, embed governance mechanisms that address the strategic-influence concerns driving FDI reviewers — an issue that has derailed or constrained transactions from Hamburg to Duisburg.
Second, articulate the efficiency and resilience case early; the new merger framework rewards investors who can quantify supply-chain benefits, not just consolidation savings.
Third, ensure internal documents reflect the true strategic rationale, not just commercial ambition — regulators across all three regimes are reading them carefully.
The tide has turned on European port investment. All hands on deck.