Port of Gdansk Brings In Consultants for Central Port Project

Poland’s Port of Gdansk Authority (PGA) has contracted a consulting company for the development of the Central Port in Gdansk on a public-private partnership model.

As a complex of envisioned 6 to 8 terminals and deep-water quays used for different purposes, the Central Port in Gdansk is the largest planned maritime investment in Europe, according to the port authority.

In May this year, PGA presented the final concept of this investment. Approximately 410 hectares of seaside land are to be used to operate terminals of various types, including areas for containers, passengers, offshore operations, LNG or shipbuilding facilities.

“We believe that the construction of such a complex infrastructure must respond to market demands. We want private investors to decide which terminals should be located here,” Lukasz Greinke, President of the PGA, said.

“On the other hand, we want to provide our future business partners and ourselves a professional project consultancy for this task.”

DS Consulting will cooperate with the PGA for over four years. During this period, the company will support the port authority in talks with potential partners and also in preparing applications for financing, creating documentation for contracts in public-private partnership with individual contractors.

As part of the agreement, DS Consulting will carry out preliminary analyses (including the feasibility study) and will provide constant consultancy for transactions, covering economic, financial, market, technical and legal issues.

The advancement of Central Port project follows a record-breaking half-year result achieved by the Port of Gdansk. In the first six months of 2019, the port moved 27.3 million tonnes of goods, a 9 percent increase compared to the corresponding period in 2018.

What is more, the port authority noted it was getting closer to St. Petersburg, the largest container port in the Baltic Sea at the moment. Gdansk would need to handle 130,000 TEU in order to catch up with the Russian port, the authority said.

Port of Gdansk’s development plans assume that the transshipment dynamics would increase even further in the coming years, mainly due to the redevelopment of the existing areas and the Central Port project. The investment will make it possible for the Polish port to handle up to 100 million tonnes a year.