Romania’s second-most important harbour, after Constanţa, is not in Romania but 800 hundred kilometers west from the country’s borders, in Slovenia. The Adriatic sea port of Koper, in the former Yugoslav republic, had an annual throughput of goods for and from Romania of 20,000 tonnes in 2019, according to data obtained by Romanian Dispatch from the harbour’s authorities.
Motor vehicles, semi-finished wood and containers are some of the most common types of cargo arriving in Romania through Koper.
“Those who work in the industry know that everything that’s coming through the Western border of Romania is shipped through Koper,” said Andrei Jerca, Head of Industrial Services of the real estate company CBRE Romania.
Imports through Constanţa, Romania’s only major port and the obvious maritime entrance to the country, generally only reach the eastern part of Romania. “Due to a lack of infrastructure you get [to the Western part of Romania] much faster via Koper,” Jerca told Romanian Dispatch.
Trains, trucks and intermodal nodes
Imported and exported goods generally go through intermodal terminals, where containers are moved from trains to trucks or vice versa. Goods are transported over long distances by train, with only the final distance covered by truck. Expensive, smaller products are generally shipped by airplanes, depending on need for speed and transfer costs. “You will never see an iPhone shipped by train,” said Jerca.
Most of the imported goods in western and central Romania go by train from Koper to Budapest and to the intermodal terminal at Curtici, near Arad, by the Hungarian-Romanian border.
Gateway to Europe
“The port of Constanta could be a real gateway for this part of Europe,” said Gabriel Gheorghe, Managing Partner at Anima Buildings, a consultancy firm. Gheorghe worked as operations development manager for the port for nine years.
In Bucharest there are two intermodal terminals for goods going to and coming from Constanţa. Yet there are no such intermodal terminals near Transylvanian cities such as Sebeș-Alba Iulia, Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu, Brașov or other major towns in central Romania.
This shortage has been partially corrected with the unveiling in Ploiești in 2019 of an intermodal railway service serving the routes between this Romanian city 80 kilometres north of Bucharest with Budapest and the Koper port in Slovenia.
“The service is particularly advantageous for Romanian shippers looking for frequent and numerous maritime connections with Mediterranean and Far East ports with excellent transit times available through the Port of Koper,” the Slovenian and Hungarian companies operating the service said at the time of its opening.
While Ploiești is still in the southern half of Romania, its proximity to Transylvania makes its new intermodal service an important link between Koper and Constanţa with the central region of Romania.
“The service operates once a week on the Ploiești-Budapest route, while the Budapest-Koper section … [offers] one or two departures daily in both directions,” the operating companies explained. This is a particularly low frequency compared to the intermodal services offered by the several nodes serving the Koper route in countries like Austria, Hungary and Slovakia, from which up to twenty trains depart each week.
The “sea gateway for Visegrád”
Besides being Romania’s second port, Koper is the number one supplier of cargo to Austria, the main port for Hungary and Slovakia as well as the leading cargo freight port in the Northern Adriatic and the second harbour when it comes to shipping vehicles in the Mediterranean, according to data available on its website. Koper promotes itself as the “sea gateway for Visegrád.”
Experts and investors attribute part of Koper’s success in apparently remote markets such as Romania’s to its excellent train connections and privileged geographic position.
For example, a market survey on transport and logistics in Slovenia produced in 2019 by Belgium’s Flemish regional government said of Koper: its “natural hinterland … stretches from Austria over Bavaria to Central European countries and beyond.” “For these markets,” according to the the survey, Koper “has one important comparative advantage: it is the shortest transport route linking these Central and Eastern European markets with the Mediterranean countries and the countries along the Suez Canal.”
According to the report, “shipping to [or through] the Port of Koper means gaining 7 to 10 days for ships arriving [or departing for] from Asia in comparison with Europe’s northern ports.”
The competition with Constanţa
Koper and Constanţa in essence are competitors as they provide the same services and serve the same area of Central Europe. According to Jerca, both shipping companies and port operators need to look inland and invest in intermodal terminals. And then step up their reach to their customers and markets via either train or truck.
Those who will manage to invest in intermodal terminals will control micro-regions. “These kinds of investments are to the tune of 50 millions euros,” Jerca told Romanian Dispatch. “It’s like a board game between Koper and Constanţa. Who will put a pin for a central inland intermodal terminal? Until recently their horizon was the sea, now they are looking inland, Jerca added”
“In the past Luka Koper has invested in the inland terminal in Curtici, a joint venture with two other companies, but since then we have sold our share”, said Sebastjan Šik, Luka Koper’s public relations director. “The Port of Koper is concentrating on investments into our core business – the port infrastructure and equipment.”
Luka Koper Group, of which the Slovenian government is the majority shareholder (51%), at the moment does not have any plans to invest in any additional intermodal node in Romania, Šik told Romanian Dispatch.
Constanţa looking inland
While the Koper port board seems hardly interested in intensifying its already fruitful connections to the Romanian market, the port of Constanţa is increasingly looking inland to compensate for recent setbacks in the volume of containers going through its docks.
An article published in August 2019 by the online publication for port executives Port Strategy referred to the substantial drop in transhipment traffic (ship-to-ship) experienced by Constanţa in recent times, due, in part, to the expansion of the Istanbul and Piraeus ports in the past years. This period also coincided with the emergence of ports in the Adriatic, such as Koper, Rijeka and Venice, which provided a new routing option to reach the Central European market via rail. As a result, Constanţa’s “current focus … is on import and export cargo,” said Cosmin Carstea, CEO of DP World Constanţa, which operates the Black Sea port since 2003.
The lack of fast and reliable train connections as well as the absence of an uninterrupted highway stretching from Constanţa, in the southeastern tip of Romania, to the country’s northern and western borders, however, remain a major obstacle in Romania’s Black Sea port’s prospects to effectively compete with Koper.
