Romania Transportation Profile 2012

Despite the rough terrain, Romania is generally well served by roads and railways. Road transportation has surpassed rail transport as the chief means of moving both passengers and freight. Pipelines carry oil and natural gas from the fields to processing centers.

Romania's main seaport is Constanta, on the Black Sea. A canal, opened in 1984, links Constanta and the Danube. Principal ports on the Danube are Galati, Brăila, and Giurgiu. TAROM, the national airline, provides international and domestic service; foreign airlines also provide international flights.

Shipping Report Q4 2010

The Romanian port of Constantza has become a port of call on a new container shipping line that was launched on the Danube. HELO 1, operated by Austrian company Helogistics Holding GmbH, started operations in Budapest in Hungary, using the container barge SL 139. According to Helogistics, this is the first regular service to operate weekly deliveries to the ports of Budapest, Belgrade and Constantza. HELO 1's service from Budapest to Constantza will take eight days and the journey back 11 days. It will take the line's vessel four days to get to Constantza from Belgrade; the trip back takes eight days. The regular service, as well as serving containers on the Danube, also offers the possibility of transporting project cargoes of up to 250 tonnes. Helogistics promises to stick to the schedule 'regardless of utilised capacity'. Weekly services in both directions, connecting three ports, will use container barges with a capacity of 144 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs).

We expect cargo handled at Romania's key port, the Port of Constantza (POC), to continue declining this year. In general tonnage terms, the port's throughput will decrease by 13.5% to 36.36mn tonnes, following a poor 2009 performance when the port was not able to sidestep the effects of the international recession (volumes fell 32.1% to 42.01mn tonnes last year). Container movements at the Port of Constantza will fall by 10.4% to 532,424TEUs this year. The port's growth has been consistently positive in recent years, but closely linked to international shipping fluctuations; last year box throughput slumped by a sharp 56.96%, after beginning to slide down in 2008, when it fell by 2.16% year-on-year.

Affected by the global recession, Romania's total trade plummeted by 11.9% in real terms in 2009, and we see a slow 2.7% rebound in 2010, followed by 4.7% growth in 2011. This year exports will grow more strongly than imports in real terms (6.0% compared with 4.0%).