Minister Butkovic and Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic visited the river port one day after the container transshipment terminal was officially opened on Wednesday.
Containers arrive by rail from the seaports of Rijeka and Koper, and cargo is also shipped from eastern Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.
Currently, 240 containers arrive at the port of Brod every week. For now, cargo arrives and departs by road and rail. Once the Sava river bed is reconstructed, the port will gain attractiveness for cargo delivered by river. It is estimated that the port could be accessible by river for 10 months of the year.
Minister Butković announced that Croatia would invest €3.5 billion in railway infrastructure in the next ten years, and without specifying he noted that even greater investments would be made for inland waterways.
He said that investments in the port are continuing through the construction of accommodation capacities for support services. The value of this investment is HRK 20 million. In addition, according to Butković, a building permit is expected by the end of the year for another HRK 20 million project related to improving the navigability of the Sava River, which would regulate the river from Novi Grad to Jaruge.
"Containers have started coming to Slavonski Brod regularly, which is now registered on an international scale as a port for loading and unloading. Wood is currently being shipped here from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. We are holding negotiations on the transport of containers from and to southern Hungary through the port in Slavonki Brod. It is closer for them to pick up containers here than to go to Budapest, where containers arrive from Antwerp and Rotterdam," the port's director Marijan Jurić said.
Jurić also announced the construction of an oil storage facility and an LNG storage facility.