The Distribution Committee of the Interport Compensation Fund approved the provisional resolution for granting subsidies to 16 commercial projects worth 6 million euros, within the framework of the Ports 4.0 program, corresponding to the 2023 call.
“67 applications were submitted to the call, of which 66 were admitted and finally 16 have been proposed for the allocation of aid, for a total of six million euros. The selected projects fall within areas such as improving logistical efficiency, safety, sustainability, and the digitalization of processes. Furthermore, the 16 selected projects have 13 Port Authorities as facilitating agents,” stated Puertos del Estado of Spain.
“The Committee also approved endowing Ports 4.0 with a new budget allocation of 18 million euros that will allow financing three new calls: ideas and commercial projects before the end of 2025 and pre-commercial projects in 2026,” it added.
The Ports 4.0 fund is the corporate open innovation model adopted by Puertos del Estado and the Port Authorities to attract, support, and facilitate the application of talent and entrepreneurship to the Spanish public and private logistics-port sector in the realm of new technologies.
Since its creation in 2020, 9 calls have been launched which have received over 900 applications, of which more than 215 ideas and projects have been awarded, for an amount exceeding 46 million euros, which will contribute to modernizing the sector.
Furthermore, in this meeting of the Distribution Committee of the Compensation Fund -a mechanism that allows the redistribution of resources within the state port system, according to needs-, the definitive distribution proposal for 2025 and the initial proposal for 2026 were approved, as well as the percentage of contribution for the Port Authorities, 5%, and for the Port Authorities of the Canary and Balearic archipelagos, of Ceuta, Melilla and Seville, 2.5%.
The initial distribution proposal for 2026, as established in the Consolidated Text of the State Ports and Merchant Marine Law, is allocated to navigation aids (9.7 million euros), to Port Authorities for their conditions of special isolation, insularity and ultra-peripherality (10.2 million euros), to security actions (1.6 million euros), to the Ports 4.0 Fund (8.7 million euros) and to other criteria according to article 159.5 b) (16.6 million euros).
The Committee also gave the green light to the update of the action program of the Financial Fund for Port Land Accessibility -whose objective is to improve the connectivity of Spanish ports- derived from the 2026 Business Plans, as well as to the Fund’s budget for the next year.
The Fund is now comprised of 58 actions representing a total investment of 1,883.9 million euros, for which a maximum contribution of 821.3 million euros from the resources generated by the public port organizations is foreseen.
