ZAGREB, March 14, 2018 – A second meeting of representatives of the Vukovar Danube river port and Romania’s Danube-Black Sea port of Constantza was held in that eastern Croatian town on Wednesday to mark the long-lasting cooperation of the two ports, its results and the potential for advancing it.
Recalling that the two ports signed a memorandum of understanding in 2015, Vukovar Port director Marijan Kuprešak said that, until 1990, up to 1.5 million tonnes of cargo had been transloaded in Vukovar annually, and that the port’s capacity today was between 1.2 and 1.5 million tonnes, depending on the type of cargo.
He said that the best post-war year was 2006, when 970,000 tonnes of cargo was transloaded in the port. However, with the onset of the economic crisis and recession, the port in 2009 handled only 175,000 tonnes of cargo. In 2017, 249,000 tonnes of cargo was transloaded, and the plan for 2018 is 350,000 tonnes, Kuprešak said.
He said that the biggest shipping partner to the Vukovar port was Romania’s TTS company.
The port of Vukovar employs 68 workers, it lies on the Danube river that is navigable year-round and is at an intersection of the European 5C corridor. It is connected with road and railway routes and is well-equipped, which makes it interesting in terms of investments.
Constantza port director Teodor Patrichi said that Constantza was the biggest Black Sea port connecting Europe via the Danube with the Black Sea and the rest of the world. It has 155 berths, 23,000 employees and transloads 57 tonnes of cargo annually, he said.
Patrichi said that in 2015, 75,000 tonnes of cargo was transported between Vukovar and Constantza and that the transit of goods now stood at 300,000 tonnes, with plans to increase it.
