GRAMPET Group – Grup Feroviar Român (GFR) welcomes the Rail-2-Sea project as very auspicious and expects it to increase Constanța harbour business opportunities and attractiveness for the European and Central European countries.
Company’s officials consider that the railway and road infrastructure modernisation connecting the Gdansk and Constanța harbours and, implicitly, the southern borders of Romania, will lead to the development of a new transit corridor for Scandinavian goods headed for Southern Europe/ Turkey and the Middle East.
“As global supply chains are being reconfigured, we are already talking about new transport corridors, and Rail-2-Sea project, which has been recently announced by His Excellency Adrian Zuckerman, US Ambassador to Bucharest, creates many opportunities with an enormous potential for Romania,” Gruia Stoica, the President of the GRAMPET Group, said.
“Another important aspect is that this modernisation will increase the attractiveness of Constanța harbour compared to those at the North Sea, respectively the Adriatic, for customers from Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, the Czech Republic, and southern Poland,” Sorin Chinde, the Vice President of Transport Department at GRAMPET Group said.
In the current epidemiological and economic context, the operator is gradually returning to the pre-pandemic operational levels and is aligning its strategy to the recent months’ changes.
In the first six months of the year, the freight transport division recorded a 12% decrease of the activity volume, but the traffic has “slightly improved in the third quarter however it was noticed a significant decrease in one of the most important segments of goods, the cereals. Our estimations for transport volumes and 2021 turnover are similar to the current year. We may say that this industry and that segment of the economy using rail transportation have learned to live with this virus,” Chinde explained.
At the same time, the consolidation strategy at the European level is delayed by the travel restrictions imposed during this period. The company says that after eight months of pandemic, its projections confirm that the decision to expand its activities to other European countries “is still sound, and this gives us confidence to continue,” Gruia Stoica said.
Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Belgium, and the Netherlands are the targeted countries for the expansion of group’s activities.
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