At the recent meeting with Poland’s Minister of Maritime Economy and Inland Navigation, Marek Grobarczyk, the Port of Gdansk Authority SA (PGA) has announced its plans to expand the largest Polish port and its capacity, as “a response to the accelerating growth in international trade, in which the role of the Port of Gdansk, especially in handling the Central and Eastern European market, is undeniably growing”, as put by Lukasz Greinke, CEO of PGA.

The port’s development plan includes two projects: the establishment of the Central Port with construction of new deep-water transhipment quays and a new Ro-Ro terminal in the Outer Port. This will be the first large-scale development of the Port of Gdansk in 40 years.

The Central Port project, being part of the “Strategy of development of Port of Gdansk by 2027”, involves the construction of new deepwater terminals to handle the largest vessels entering the Baltic Sea, as well as storage facilities, well-connected to the network of modern roads and railways. Therefore, the Central Port will serve as an infrastructure base with the distribution functions covering the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.

The new Ro-Ro terminal will be constructed in the immediate vicinity of the DCT, Poland’s largest and fastest growing container terminal. This project responds to the growing importance of Gdansk in the automotive market.

Thus, in October 2016, PGA and Adampol, a large Polish vehicle logistics company, signed a letter of intent committing to take joint actions to transform the Port of Gdansk into the country’s automotive logistics center. In January 2017, the Port of Gdansk started handling Hyundai cars from Nosovice in the Czech Republic shipped to the British port of Tilbury. And since April 1, 2017, the port has begun working by a three-year contract for handling Nissan cars (Renault Nissan Alliance) intended for the Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian markets. Using the port as the automotive distribution hub for Central and Eastern Europe requires expansion of storage areas up to 100,000 cars.

According to PGA, both port development projects were fully accepted by the Minister Marek Grobarczyk, who emphasized that the project “will strengthen the potential of Gdansk as the largest Polish sea port capable of competing with the ports of Western Europe”. PGA SA received the green light to start design work on the investments and to talk with the city authorities. Decisions in the field of development of urban road infrastructure will be of key importance for these projects.