With the accomplished crane rails construction at the container terminal and following the presentation of the new RMG cranes (overhead travelling cranes on rails), Luka Koper successfully brought to an end the first part of its substantial investing in the container terminal. By 2020, the largest part of planned investments, namely 235 million euros will be invested in the same terminal, the company said in its press release.
The introduced technology is brand new and has not been applied in Koper by now. Since the RMG cranes move on rails, a new 740-metre-long crane lane had to be constructed and the warehousing blocks at the same terminal had to be moved. Nevertheless, the new cranes will significantly contribute to increase the productivity at the container terminal where operations will proceed much faster than with the previous machinery.
In addition, the new cranes will enable the loading/unloading of containers on five trainsets simultaneously. Until recently, we had only three railway tracks that we previously extended and subsequently, we built additional two tracks, each 700 metres long.
Already next month, two new super post-panamax cranes will allow to operate even on the largest container ships with 20,000 TEUs capacity.
Since 2014 when a new development cycle coincided with the dredging of the basin 1 seabed to -14 meters, until today, the company invested 124 million euros in the development of its core business. The investments made over the last three years generated good results too: the maritime throughput increased from 17.9 million tonnes in 2013 to 22 million tonnes in 2016. The highest growth was registered in the sphere of two strategic cargo segments: cars and containers. Namely, the cars increased from 463 thousand units in 2013 to 749 thousand units in 2016, whereas the containers throughput rose from 600 thousand TEUs in 2013 to the record 844 thousand TEUs registered at year-end 2016.